


Call Me Griogair

by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Closeted Character, Coming Out, Depression, Everyone is Happy in the end, Ghost John, Ghost Sex, Ghost Stories, Happy Ending Johnstrade, Hauntings, Hopeful Ending, Johnstrade, Longing, M/M, Mourning, Past Lives, Past Murder, Sailor John, Shetland Islands, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicidal actions, Yes everyone - Freeform, Young DI Greg Lestrade, angsty backstory, gay ghosts, ghost story, halloween fic, no actual suicide, seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-07-27 08:06:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16214927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John/pseuds/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John
Summary: “No such things as ghosts, Gregory” my mum had once said to me, holding a flashlight under my bed. She’d been shaking her head.And yet . . . and yet he had one watery arm raised towards me, salt dripping from his fingers, drifting away forever to the eternal grey void, and I needed to chase him, to catch him, to drive my car over the surface of the sea until I captured the figure with my bare hands and asked him why I’ve felt a nauseating pulse in the pit of my gut since first stepping off the Glasgow to Lerwick ferry. Why I dreamt each night of the bluest eye as large as the sea. Swallowing me whole until I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Why there were puffs of ice against my nape whenever my eyes caught a glimpse of the Shetland sea.Burlap against my back. Hot breath on my cheek. The salty grime of the belly of a ship.Soft hands.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I don't even know how this happened. But I've barely had any time to write anything at all lately, and I thought I'd lost all motivation for my current projects, and for whatever reason I woke up one day and this story had planted itself firmly in my head. I couldn't get rid of it.
> 
> Special thanks to MissDavis and everyone else on twitter who told me to write whatever the hell I wanted even if it wasn't a current project <3
> 
> Behold the thirty seconds of research I did for this fic, literally copied and pasted from scotland.org:  
> "Bean-Nighe: Scottish Gaelic for 'washer woman', is a Scottish fairy seen as an omen of death. It is said she could be found by streams and pools washing the clothes of those who are about to die."
> 
> Apologies to all of Scotland for what I'm sure is a gross misapropriation of the above important piece of cultural history and folklore. Apologies also for the way I've typed accents and dialects in this fic. I tried, I promise. Thanks for letting me borrow all this for a gay ghost story. Also thanks to the TV show Shetland, the love of my life, for making this ficlet setting possible.
> 
> This is about 75% written and 100% planned out, with 3 chapters that will all be about the same length. Please heed the tags on this one. Ways to contact me are in my profile if you have any additional concerns about the material. 
> 
> Enjoy :)

They called her the Siren of Death, the Lady of the Lake.

Bean-Nighe.

“Not a killer yar lookin’ fer,” the one-eyed man told me. “S’a ghost. The washer woman. She comin’ to get all those young lads, ain’t she? Killin’ ‘em with’er claws, she is.”

I nodded once over the scalding cup of tea I was ignoring and closed my eyes. A few years before I would have laughed aloud at someone referring to four notorious London drug dealers as ‘young lads,’ but something else was commanding my full attention instead.

“A ghost,” I finally said. “Your tip is that a ghost is causing the victims’ bodies to wash up on shore?”

“Not just a ghost,” he wailed, and the phlegm in his throat crackled. “It’s _her_ , I tell ye.”

I sighed. It appeared that every ghost on all of Shetland was a _her_ \--that no man in the history of the islands had ever tragically died.

“Right,” I said, breathing in the sea spray. “Her.”

“You didnae hear it from me,” he hissed. His eye flickered white, then grey. “She be comin’ for yer clothes next, you hear?”

Something ice cold suddenly puffed at the nape of my neck. The ground trembled. 

My hand flew to the spot, expecting to find bird droppings or a huge splatter of rain, but it came away dry. An invisible icicle snaked down my spine in its wake, dripping between the bones. I shivered, and for just a moment, for only the span of a blink, the incoming wave on the churning sea heaved up towards the sky, forming a warped pillar outlined by the storming horizon.

Forming legs, forming arms, a neck, kelp-covered eyes . . .

And the water shattered back into the sea foam hissing across the rocks, disappearing faster than it had even begun. I tore my gaze away from the place where the water had just risen into the air. Where my eyes had glimpsed an impossible thing rising from the waters, where there had just been the shape of a . . .

I needed to crawl back to our dingy, wet motel and lie down. Well, inhale three fingers of the hardest liquor in all of Lerwick, then lie down.

I hid my flinch at the fresh burst of sea spray across my face with a bored shuffle of my feet.

“Sir?” said Dochsley behind me when I hadn’t said a response. They’d only been calling me “Sir” for less than three weeks.

I watched the screaming waves hurl foam towards the gulls’ wings.

“A ghost,” I muttered under my breath, shaking my head. I binned my undrunk tea; it was only a ruse for me to have something casual in my hands--puts the witness at ease. Witness my arse.

“Thanks for your time,” I said without looking at his watery eye.

“She’ll get ye!” he yelled at my back as we walked to the squad car, away from the hissing water. “Swear it, swear on yer mam’s grave you’ll be leavin’ her alone. She’ll get ye dead. Swear!”

And just as I turned around to tell this crumbling fisherman that his story of a killer ghost was nothing but a crock of shit, there was a wail across the endless grey waters. A guttural scream. 

It was no old woman’s voice.

It echoed over the sea, spliced up my chattering bones, cracked through centuries of ice. It froze the teeth in my mouth, burned the breath in my lungs, yanked hard on my skin.

 _Wait!_ it cried straight down my throat.

I stopped in my tracks and whipped around, eyes like lasers, searching for the source, the lungs, the lips, searching for a bobbing head being thrashed by the sea, searching for a reason, a form, a man, _the man_ , and tendrils of ice wrapped around the back of my neck, up through my hair, and my cheeks were being sucked by the wind until they were numb, and the voice reverberated in the waves, shattering across the shore until it sliced through my ribs . . .

But there was nothing on the beach. Nobody but us.

I waited with a frozen heart, trapped in a cage with blood pouring into my gut, pooling in my limbs. But only the gulls screamed.

When I turned back to the squad car, everyone else was staring at me. 

“Sir?” said Dochsley with his hand hovering above the car door. 

I cleared my throat and physically shook the groan from my ears.

“Thought I heard something,” I muttered. I kept my back to the sea. “Was just the gulls.”

“‘Twas her!” the man cried behind me, wailing over the waves. “She’s seen ye! She knows!”

“Then you’d best wish me your luck,” I said as I flung open the rain soaked car door. “Apparently I’m going to need it.”

The droplets splattered across my shirt, wrinkling the fabric over my middle. I’d been wearing that same shirt for thirty-two hours straight, since the moment I’d thrown it on after receiving the call at two in the morning back in London. 

I’d pretended to have just been asleep with my boss on the other end of the line. Fake-groggily hummed at how there were two more bodies and a plane waiting for me to board. Catch the six am ferry from Glasgow with Dochsley. I have no fucking idea why they’re ending up in Shetland, Lestrade, that’s what the hell you’re for. Pack a bloody toothbrush, you’ll be there a good week. Don’t be late. 

Nobody needed to know that I’d been awake already, staring down at my phone in the pitch dark with my finger hovering over the profile picture of oiled, toned abs and a muscled chest. Nobody needed to know that I would have sat there for hours without pressing ‘send’.

“They weren’t jokin’,” said the local sergeant, Gillian, as she slammed her door. I revved the engine, and the tires screeched on the slick road. “You Londoners comin’ all the way up here, thinkin’ we’re all just idiots on the rocks. Think you be knowin’ better’n all of us about our own island, eh?”

She was smiling at me. It was a certain kind of smile, and I glimpsed the pink bubblegum popped between her teeth. Raindrops clung to her cardigan over her breasts. She was arching her back.

“A ghost,” I sighed as we flew down the one-lane road. “A bloody ghost. What a load of bollocks. Calling us all the way out to the edge of the earth to give us a tip about a bloody ghost.”

Dochsley laughed from the backseat as Gillian’s forearm shivered beside me.

She whispered to the window pane when she thought I couldn’t hear her, “bean-nighe.”

-

That night I dreamt of a single blue eye as large as the sea. It blinked, and it swallowed me. I sank down, down, down, until the tips of my toes were gripped by the tangled, salty weeds. Until a lock of golden hair wound its way around my thigh. Until there was hot breath on my scalp, choking, drowning . . .

And seawater dripped from the ceiling, raining me with sand. The wind tore my bedsheets from my naked body and flung them across the rocks, tattering the fragile silk. The moldy robes in bean-nighe’s wet, aching fingers with the painfully swollen joints, and the way a dead man’s ripped shirt faded into a bleeding mud. The barnacle covered cap of a white-bone sailor. Blood-soaked rope.

And a bare foot stepping across the waters, halting the waves of the sea. Transforming the hum of the earth into the prong of a tuning fork perfectly aligned to my own thrumming veins. 

The wobble of the hum. The call at the bottom of my open throat.

Prickling the hair on my lower back into needles, and my palms cascading down that plane of muscled abs, spilling out guts and ribs, ripping apart the pale skin.

 _Stay with me_ moaned The Voice, dripping wet into my ear. A calloused fingertip slid across my eyelashes, dipped into my eye.

_Wait . . .please, it’s me . . .!_

I woke up with a choked scream.

-

“Rough night, sir?”

_Foam, waves, mud--_

I nodded at Dochsley. Blinked the rotting fingertip out of my eye. “Hard to get a good night’s sleep on this desolate rock they all call a place to live.”

“Aye,” he agreed, laughing.

Gillian rolled her eyes from where she sat with her boots up on her desk. “Better do somthin’ ‘bout that. Gonna be a late night again for you two.” She threw back a mouthful of tea. “Pulled lookout duty, eh?”

_Blood in the water, salty and sharp--_

“I’m _commanding_ a lookout,” I corrected, “Since all you lot have come up with after four victims is that a ghost of an old hag washing clothes committed the crimes.”

“Eh now, ‘s not as horrible as some of yer theories. What did you tell me last night, Dochsley? A giant bird?”

Dochsley turned pink as I gave him a hard stare. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, how else are the eyes missing?!”

My jaw dropped open. “Christ, ever heard of a knife?”

“See, Lestrade,” Gillian went on, “Yer own team’s almost as bad as Ol’ Finlay with his ghosts.”

_Stay with me!_

“This isn’t a ghost,” I said down at my hands as I shuffled disorganized papers. “And it’s not a bloody bird. It’s a living, breathing man with a length of rope, is all it is. And something against drugs in London, for all God knows.”

“Ah, you’ve decided it’s a man now, have you?” Gillian called to my back.

_Wait!_

“I didn’t decide,” I said over my shoulder. “I know.” 

I strode out the glass station doors into the pouring rain before she or anyone else could ask me how. Rain pounded into my bones as I jogged to the sleek black car with my head down, and I nearly slid across the entire parking lot when I slammed down the accelerator too hard.

_It’s me . . ._

I gripped the steering wheel with painful white knuckles. Grit my teeth.

The craggy edges of the island blurred by in the corners of my vision through the fogged-up windows, slashed by the wind and rain. I had a soggy list of more witnesses to interview in my pocket, a stack of uncompleted paperwork waiting for me back on the extra desk at the Lerwick station, unanswered messages lighting up my phone from two unidentified him’s and one identified her. I had a sandwich waiting for me in my bag back on my desk chair with only one bite missing, frustrated voicemails from my boss back in his shiny London office, a whiteboard of victims and bodies and suspects and clues and I

just drove and drove and drove

until my headlights illuminated the sky off the edges of cliffs, and the moors bowed down around me, weighed down by the foggy groans. I drove as that puff of white ice at the nape of my neck grew to encircle my jaw, my scalp, the inner swirls of my ears.

That voice.

It hummed along my spine, pushing at my thighs and my shoulder blades and waist, until all I could feel was the ice of the island, the decades, the centuries of buried rocky mud, and the froth of the sea as it lapped over the slick ocean floor, punishing the weeds and the coral into salty dust. 

_Come back . . ._

I was coming. I was driving and driving until I couldn’t feel the road, the seat of the car, the surface of the earth. Until I was flying through the clouds with the thunder all around me, and that figure, that man, suddenly appeared over the watery horizon, shimmering in the beams from the headlights. 

It was _it_. It was him.

“ _No such things as ghosts, Gregory_ ” my mum had once said to me, holding a flashlight under my bed. She’d been shaking her head.

And yet . . . and yet he had one watery arm raised towards me, salt dripping from his fingers, drifting away forever to the eternal grey void, and I needed to chase him, to catch him, to drive my car over the surface of the sea until I captured the figure with my bare hands and asked him why I’ve felt a nauseating pulse in the pit of my gut since first stepping off the Glasgow to Lerwick ferry. Why I dreamt each night of the bluest eye as large as the sea. Swallowing me whole until I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Why there were puffs of ice against my nape whenever my eyes caught a glimpse of the Shetland sea.

Burlap against my back. Hot breath on my cheek. The salty grime of the belly of a ship.

Soft hands.

I turned my wheel. Angled the car. Was going to chase him, catch him, corner and demand. Was going to follow him, race him, capture bean-nighe. Was going to force the watery outlines of his form to become flesh and bone beneath my hands. To speak through his own mouth, and not through the mist of the sea.

_Come . . . please . . ._

I was coming. I was going to hold him. . . hold him against me . . .hold in my arms . . .

Was going to ask him why he called me. Why he let me see him.

Why he was a he.

A mighty honk. The scream of a horn. Headlights illuminated my face, slicing across the car, and the scream I heard came from my own mouth as I ripped the wheel with my hands and flung my car back to my own side of the road. The truck raced by me, honking its horn in rage. 

My throat closed shut.

I slammed on my brakes as my roaring heart pounded blood through my veins. My hands were shaking and frozen to the wheel. I waited for the earth around me to start to settle into focus--for my vision to clear on the familiar front of the car, the steady line of the rain-soaked road, the comforting softness of the moors and moss. The reality of the tires squealing as the calm, clueless cars passed me by.

Gentle patter of the rain.

I waited for the voice to call me. To ask my why I didn’t come. I waited for it to beg me to keep driving off the road. I waited, as if I’d been waiting my entire life to hear that horrific scream across the waters. As if it was the voice of the thoughts in my head. My own soul.

It never came.

A knock at the window startled me. I leapt in my seat. 

“Sir?” I heard.

I peered through the fog to see a familiar hand rapping on the glass. Deeply frowning eyes.

“Sir, is that you? You alright?”

I took a breath and rolled down the window, shielding my eyes from the sideways rain. Dochsley was hunched over holding his jacket up over his head.

“Saw your car parked on the side of the road, Sir. Something wrong with the engine? Gillian sent me to track you down--you weren’t answering your phone. Thought you were stuck tracking down your witnesses.”

The ordinariness of his voice, the phones and the witnesses and the car engine, it made me suddenly want to weep. I swallowed back a thick moan.

“Yep, fine,” I said, trying not to sound like I’d lost my wits. I glanced down at my phone. Nineteen missed calls. “Sorry, must have had it on vibrate.”

Dochsley frowned at the phone for a second before looking back at me. His eyes traced my pale face. I wondered if he could see the beads of sweat on my brow. The pulse in my neck.

The tear dripping down from my eye.

“Right, well . . . trouble with the car? Gillian said it’s a bit old . . .”

“No, no,” I cleared my throat. Rubbed my hands together. “No trouble. Was just . . . clearing my head. You know, this case.” I lifted my hands, as if that could somehow mean something.

Dochsley seemed to think it did. He nodded in sympathy. “‘S a right pain in the arse, this case. Can’t wait to get off this blasted island. Think the watch tonight’ll help?”

A shiver ran through my bones at the thought of spending all night on the frozen shore. I nodded. “Let’s hope so. Can’t imagine it’ll hurt.”

_Stay . . ._

I clenched my hands together between my thighs. Plastered my back to the seat. Dochsley grinned. 

“Maybe catch a nap before then, sir? Look like you could use one.”

“Watch yourself,” I said with a fake grin.

He laughed, as if standing in the rain on the side of the road was the most fun he’d ever had in the world. “Aye, sir. Meet you near the rocks at eight?”

“Seven-fifty-five.”

“Sir.”

I waved him off as I began to roll up the window, then waited until he disappeared into his own squad car. Until his taillights disappeared over the foggy curve and into the mists. 

I pulled down the visor and peered at my face in the smudged glass. Shadows crawled over the circles under my eyes, and my hair looked like I’d raked through it endlessly for days. The rims of my eyes were red.

_Come here . . ._

Only it wasn’t a command, it was a whisper. A beautiful, pained plea.

A caress.

I slammed shut the visor and tore the car back onto the road. I told myself I’d squeeze in one more interview before it was time to head back for the night’s watch. Tomorrow I’d eat. Tomorrow I’d sleep.

Tomorrow I’d stop hearing voices in my head.

The road was desolate and lazy as I wound my way through, sighing under the weight of the wheels as I passed. Distantly, thunder moaned, tumbling down the cliffs. And as I drove, my life continued on as if nothing had passed. As if I wasn’t going insane or sinking deep into an abyss. As if I’d been one of the people standing by the shore with Ol’ Finlay who hadn’t heard a scream. Who hadn’t seen the watery man.

But as I rounded the widest bend in the lonely road, and the vastness of the grey, restless ocean came stunningly into view, I suddenly heard a word, a reminder that everything about me had crumbled irreperably from within. 

It was a name, a name of thousands, and yet of nobody that I knew. A name that spread out over the surface of the waves like velvet froth. Like the warm mantle of rocks beneath the sea itself.

A memory of a lost world.

The groaning creak of a kelp-covered hull.

“ _John,_ ” I heard, vibrating like honey through my limbs, filling in the parts of me that had crumbled, that had flown away and disappeared. 

And I gasped, because it wasn’t the ghostly voice that had said it, but my own.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added one additional scene to my planning, which added another chapter. Yahoo!
> 
> Griogair is the Scottish form of the name Gregory.
> 
> Enjoy :)

“Miserable night for a watch, ain’t it, sir?”

Dochsley was huddled beside me, blowing his nose into a damp kerchief and shaking so hard his jacket rustled louder than the waves. He had his knees pulled up to his chin like a giant spider curled in the front seat. 

I didn’t move a muscle where I sat with a blank stare at the distant waves, my nose hidden in the moist warmth of my pulled-up jacket collar. “Pull yourself together, man” I said. “Shaking so hard you’ll scare away anything breathing.”

He promptly stopped shivering for a few seconds, then started again with a groan. “Can’t help it, sir,” he muttered. “Not like there’s much to occupy the mind, is there?”

I couldn’t fault him there. Nearly three in the morning and all we’d seen from the squad car parked in the shadows above the shore were a few lost seagulls and one sputtering crab. The watch had been a fool’s errand anyway, we both knew deep down. It had been painted all across Gillian’s face when we left for the night. Sitting there in the freezing cold madly hoping that the killer would choose that particular night to drag another body into the frothing waves. 

But Christ, I had hoped . . .

The wind licked at the sides of the car. Snaked through the wheels.

“Go and find yourself a bloody tea,” I finally told him, suddenly whispering for a reason I’d never be able to explain. “Don’t need two of us here, and at this rate the only dead body we find tonight’ll be you.”

“What, and leave you standing out here in the cold?”

“I’ll survive.”

Dochsley didn’t even hesitate, but practically levitated out of the car. I forced myself to step out into the freezing night so he could settle in the driver’s side. He had to adjust the seat backward nearly a foot.

“Cor, thank you, sir. Oughta be a little twenty-four hour mart around Lerwick, you think?”

I wrapped my arms around my chest and spoke through the rolled-down window over the piercing roar of the engine. “I don’t care where you get it from, just get me something hot, too.”

Dochsley smiled, completely unphased by the way I was spitting my words at him, at the sea, at the world. “Right you are, sir. Wouldn’t leave you hangin’ now, would I?”

I waved him off with a “go on, then,” and allowed myself one great shiver in the fresh whoosh of icy air as the squad car sped away. The earth seemed even more silent once the purr of the engine faded away into the curtain of fog. They could probably hear my breathing all the way back in London.

For some reason, I hesitated, steeling myself before I turned away from the road and back to the sea. I forced a deep breath of ice into my lungs, focusing on the sturdy reality of the asphalt, the moors, the heavy fabric of my coat.

Pocket bulging with my gun.

But the moment my eyes met the white foam of the water across the rocks, a humming boom rushed towards me from the glowing horizon, settling across all the island in a mighty wave. It instantly muffled the sound of everything but a high-pitched moan. Blacked out the stars. Blurred the edges of my bones.

And my blood fizzled in my veins, crackled beneath my skin. Strands of my hair blew away from my face, and needles danced on the tips of my fingers.

There was a hum, a groan, a sigh of pleasure, slapping into my chest and wrapping hot palms around my spine. It dragged my muscles towards the sea one by one in a relentless fade.

 _You came . . ._ it said over the droning tone across the moors, hushing the noise of the sea.

Enveloping me in a great gust of warm, dry sand. A cloud around my skin. Sharp liquor across a rolling tongue.

For one blinding moment, I thought about holding on with both hands to the real world. Looking over my shoulder to see if Dochsley had said those words, if the voice came from my phone, if this was all just a hoax---trick the London cop, make him believe in ridiculous Shetland ghosts.

 _No, stay. Please . . ._ in a rushing wind across my back. I took one shaking step into the swirling sand. My boot crunched on the ice-covered rocks. I tasted brine.

I let go of my grip on the world and slowly opened my mouth.

“Who’s there?” I whispered. My voice ripped and cracked. 

_It’s me . . ._ it said, _he_ said. There was a call of sadness in his tone. The grains of sand on the beach vibrated with his voice, rising into the air itself before crackling back to the wet shore.

Another step, and another, until the world was too far behind me to ever turn back. Until the kelp washed up by the high tide was licking at my boots. Until the sea spray coated my shaking lips. Until . . .

And I suddenly knew, better than I knew the rushing beat of my own heart, what to say. What to call out to the endless void of the grey sea for the first time.

_(for the thousandth time)_

I licked my lips, looked once back over my shoulder. The world was still there in the murky distance, hardy and real. It was rain-splattered and gravel-coated and waiting for me to drive back to Lerwick in the squad car at dawn. Waiting for me to finish the sandwich in my bag, the paperwork on my desk, the calls from London from my boss. Waiting for me to touch solid wood and metal and glass. Waiting for me to---

I turned back to the billowing sea. Let the salt fill my chest as I opened my mouth to the wall of impenetrable blue dark.

“John?” I whispered, the barest noise over the droning hum. My lips wrapped themselves with lost longing over the lone word. My tongue shook.

A sigh, an exhale, a breath so vast it knocked all the sounds of the world away, turned the waves of the sea into rushing music, made the hidden stars shine like silver lips through the storming clouds. It blew the salt spray from my face, dried my damp clothes. Curled and brushed through my hair, gripping the strands. 

_Remember me_ it breathed, and tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. I felt my fingers reaching forward to capture worn palms.

_(rope calloused palms stripping off a sweat-soaked shirt, salt licked off a shoulder, chapped lips in my hair)_

And before I could open my lips to ask what I was supposed to remember, what part of my soul I had forgotten, which of my bones I had left behind, the sea itself rose up before me, swirling into the familiar pillar. 

My eyes settled on it with a rush of sharp emotion, focusing on the watery lines, the foggy imprint of a lost face, the salt-dripping hands, only . . .

Flesh and bone. Skin and muscle. A bold black outline of a breathing man against the horizon.

A tattered sailor’s coat.

And he was _there_ , right there in front of my very eyes on the booming shore. Standing in the middle of the waves. Floating on the water. A beating heart instead of seafoam. Warm skin instead of mud.

Not a ghost, but a real . . . a real . . .

The killer!

In a flash, the fog cleared, and the world sharpened to a point. The real world, asphalt and rocks and police badges and guns. The hissing steel of a smoking bullet. Bodies on the shore.

Power throbbed through my veins as I burst into action, leaping across the rocks towards the man in the waves. The broken shells crunched beneath my boots. Coat cut into my freezing skin. Hand clutched hot metal.

“Stop!” I cried, only he wasn’t moving. Not a muscle. He wasn’t speaking or shimmering or floating up into the clouds. 

Wasn’t saying anything back.

_Wait . . ._

“Police! Hands above your head!” I screamed, only the man raised one hand towards me, glowing ghastly in the watery moon.

A knife in his hand? A rock? 

_I waited . . . I’ve been waiting . . ._

A gun?

_(the compass)_

I was going to keep sprinting towards him--this man I’d been waiting to put in cuffs for weeks. Was going to manhandle him, tackle him into the water and sand. Slam him into the mud. Scream in his face why he was leaving his mess of death on the Shetland shore for me to clean up.

Why he had to choose _here_ of all the goddam places.

Two steps away, and I heard him suck in a shocked breath. One step away, and his darkened face became clear in the light from the stars.

_(deep blue eyes as large as the sea)_

I threw my arms out and grit my teeth. Leapt off from the ground, reached for his shoulders, slammed into him with all my weight, and . . . 

air

nothing 

_Remember . . . please . . ._

I crashed through a void, shocking cold mist upon my face. What was once flesh and bone suddenly evaporated across my body, disappearing through my chest, and I shivered as my own face collided with the killer’s

_(not the killer’s, not a killer, not a ghost, not a man)_

with John’s.

Falling, hovering in the air as I looked down into a passenger cabin of an ancient ship. Brass compass tangled on the rotting, wet floor. A heap of clothes, half beautiful, half worn.

 _Remember . . ._ in my bones. In my teeth. Behind my eyes.

And two figures were below me on a thin burlap cot, one on top of the other as the ship rocked with the rolling waves, groaning with the weight of the thrashing sea. Salt dripping from the ceiling. Mold in the ancient wood.

Rust. Wool. Whiskey aged in a ship’s belly.

_Please . . ._

Bare backs. Drops of hot sweat on skin.

Only it was the man on the cot who was the one saying “please”, his chapped lips moving slowly to form the word, whispering it into a shock of silver hair. Clutching a spine.

“ _Go on with me to Bressay,_ ” the man was moaning, pleading, his eyes closed and nose pressed into the other man’s neck. 

And the man on top of him was moving, rolling, breathing. Sighing into his ear.

Thighs shoulders buttocks. Thrusting _inside_ him. Tan calves wrapped around hips. A whispered curse.

The man lying flat on his back on the cot opened his eyes, then stared straight up at me, straight through my bones to the creaking ceiling, and I flinched to turn away, to hide my face, when

_(deep blue eyes as large as the sea)_

and John blinked away the water in those pained eyes, deepening the decades of sun and lines. He looked older, weathered, the way a man’s body would be aged and molded by the pounding sea. The way the long years would strengthen and wear. 

He moaned and ran his fingers through the silver hair. I felt the shivers along my own scalp.

“ _Stay with me. Don’t get off in Glasgow. Please . . ._

The man on top took John’s face in his smooth hands and kissed him. Gently brushed away the sweat soaked hair from his brow. My eyes burned. He hummed into his lips before pressing their faces together.

He was crying. The rolling of his hips had stopped.

“ _I swear, I swear over God’s green earth, I’ll come for you_ ” he said a voice that I felt in my own throat, tongue slapping against teeth. “ _In Shetland, I’ll come and find you._ ”

John closed his eyes and swallowed, and the man brushed away a tear dripping down his cheek with his thumb. The man reached down towards the floor, fingers scrambling until they found the metal chain of the compass, then lifted it, huffed once on the brass to warm it with his breath, and placed it on John’s chest. 

John covered it carefully with his fingers. The man kissed them over the brass.

“ _Take this with you,_ ” he begged, hoarse and desperate in my own chest. “ _My promise that I’ll come_.”

John shook his head. Ran his palm down the man’s jaw until his fingers brushed through strands of silver. The scars on his hands were decades old.

“ _I can’t take this_ ,” he whispered, but the man covered his mouth with his own and kissed his tongue, tasted the words. I inhaled a hot breath. 

“ _You can. You will,_ ” and he missed the way John’s face broke as the man turned to kiss up his tan neck, a wet trail of whispers I couldn’t hear but could perfectly recite. 

“ _Wait for me. Christ on earth, wait for me. John . . ._ ”

And there was ice at the edges of my blurred vision as the two men began to roll on the cot, one over the other. Water on my eyelashes, seeping into my ears, as John pressed the other man back into the burlap, covering him with a sturdy back

_(one freckle on the back of his right thigh, two at his nape)_

and I reached forward, reached towards them wildly with my bare hands, longing and begging and pleading to feel, to be joined. Wanting to be the one to feel a man’s hands on my young skin, Christ . . .

_(to feel John’s hands)_

And a hush and a sigh and a moan mixed with the gurgling creak of the ship.

“ _John, love. . ._ ”

Wet lips on mine. Somehow, impossibly, as they kissed, lips pressed to my own mouth.

I was going to sink into his arms. Float down from the ceiling and push this other man out of the way and let John hold me, and I him. I was going to be the one to brush his neck with forgotten kisses, melt beneath the muscle, ache and want and hold and --

The other man buried his face in John’s neck as his back hit the cot. He ran his hands over John’s shoulders. Touched the freckle on the back of John’s thigh. Sighed at the heavy weight of his body.

And _Griogair_ suddenly woven through John’s arching spine, pooling in the soft bed of hair on the other man’s chest. A word that sounded like waves kissing a barnacle crusted hull. A word that sounded like the hidden fleck of gold in my own brown eye. 

And then the man looked straight up at me, through my bones to the rotting ceiling. His eyes unconsciously met mine.

Shock exploded through me:

I was staring down at me.

At _myself._

And John’s cheek was on _my_ chest, his lips on my ribs, his chin resting on my stomach which was older, softer. The stubble on his face rasping against my skin.

Wild hands on my back. Rough arms yanking on my clothes. A manic yell through thick foam.

I was staring down at me. Crow’s feet. Silver hair. John’s fingers on my lips. His tongue rolling against mine.

_(whose lips? whose tongue?)_

I was staring down at me.

Grit flooding my mouth, ice water in my lungs, the slap of the harsh tide.

“Sir! Dammit, sir! Come on!”

John’s lost breath on my cheek.

 _”I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait. My Griogair . . ._ ”

I was staring down at --

Up at the storming night sky. Dochsley’s face.

“Christ, sir! How in hell did you get in the water?! Come on . . .”

I felt my limp body being yanked against the tide, hurled up onto the wet sand in full view of the stars. The crystal lines of reality slapped and prickled against me, burning my eyes and slicing my skin. The heavy weight of my coat, the metal still clutched in my hand, the salt smell of the sea. Dochsley’s hands on my chest, my face. 

A nauseating gulp of seawater suddenly made its way back up through my throat, and I heaved myself over to cough and hack into the foam. The second my lips met the wet sand, the weight of the entire world settled on my shoulders. Sadness covered the stars, sucked all the softness from the air. Left my skin untouched and cold.

I moaned aloud. I understood everything. “He never came,” I gasped.

_You came . . ._

“Who never came? The suspect? Christ, sir, you’re freezing wet. Jesus, come on, let’s get you back to the --”

I could barely see. My hands gripped helplessly for fistfuls of water and mud, desperate for the burlap, for the skin. My throat was aching and choked. “He didn’t come.”

_You did come . . ._

“Honestly, sir, I don’t give a rat’s arse about him coming or not coming now. You scared me out my wits finding you like this. Need to get you to hospital, come on to the car, let’s --”

“No! No hospital.”

I heaved myself to my hands and knees, coughing up more lungfuls of seawater back into the rushing tide. I was shivering uncontrollably, gasping for air. When I coughed again, Dochsley slapped my back so hard my struggling vision went grey.

“Christ, man, don’t kill me!”

“Sorry, sir, I just . . . I don’t know what---did you fall?”

I stood up too quickly, swayed a bit, then waved off Dochsley’s hand. 

“I didn’t bloody fall. I saw . . . I . . .” I flung my arm at the sea while walking back to the squad car, trying not to slip and fall on the slick rocks and shifting sand. Something about the darkness, the feel of the air itself, told me that a significant amount of time had passed since Dochsley first drove away. I didn’t want to know the time.

_(didn’t want to know how long he waited)_

“I thought I saw the suspect, so I pursued,” I finally said. I stumbled as I spat out the words, and Dochsley hovered hot on my heels trying to guide me by the elbow. 

I caught him quickly glancing back over his shoulder, scanning the empty horizon above the crashing waves. He gave the side of my face an odd, pained look.

_No, stay . . ._

“Well, sir, it, er . . . it seems that whoever it was is gone. Now.”

“No shit.”

I tried to fling open the locked car door, then held my hand over the roof for the keys.

Dochsley’s eyes went wide. “Oh, are you sure it’s a good idea to--”

“The keys.”

He stammered. “You . . . you’ve just nearly drowned, and I . . . I --”

“An order, Dochsley. Or you’re walking back to Lerwick along the road with a bloody eye.”

He bit his lip, then slowly placed the keys in my open palm. I gripped the metal hard enough to leave a mark on my skin, to hide the wild trembling in my fist.

Dochsley didn’t say a word more as the engine shattered the thick silence, and we raced down the empty road. The water still dripping from my coat started to create a murky pool in my lap. I could feel Dochsley staring at the strip of seaweed wrapped over my shoulder.

Then, “Cor, sir, got something nasty all in your hair!”

I grit my teeth. Gripped the wheel with frozen hands. Flew around the next turn too fast.

“Probably just kelp. Sand.”

“Naw, sir. Ain’t it. It’s . . . it’s something silver like. Look like it’s gone and . . . dyed it, or --”

“I’ll wash it out, then,” I spat.

He wrung his hands together. “Right, sir. Right.”

The words flew out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Tell Gillian and her team I’ll be out of the station tomorrow.”

Relief flashed across his face. “Of course. Good. Can imagine you’ll be needing a day of rest, what with all that happened this night. Can’t imagine how you’re even still breathing, if I’m honest. We’ll send someone to your room with tea and --”

“I’ve a lead to track down. Won’t be in the room. Should just take the day.”

Dochsley’s eyes were glued to the side of my face. “A . . . a lead you say, sir? Should I assist?”

“Just some research. I’ll be going alone.”

He swallowed. The first Lerwick streetlamp suddenly burst into view, coating his face with gold. “Where then, sir?”

_Stay with me . . . go on with me . . ._

I nearly choked suddenly trying to swallow down a brogue I’d never before felt in my throat. A thick dam ready to burst, pressing the rich Shetland moors against my own teeth. I cleared my throat. Practiced saying the word normally in my head.

_(you saw him that first moment on the ship, that first step off the gangplank, bag slung over your back, and he was tying the sails up in the mast, you’d just buried your wife, the deep lines in your face, his cotton shirt in the Spanish breeze, and he looked at you, looked at you, and he held you with his rough hands that first night in the shadows, held you like you’d never been held in fifty years, and his clothes were so worn, you never offered him any of your own, and that first kiss_

_the moon saw it)_

The tear that slid down my cheek was lost in the clinging saltwater from the sea. John’s thumb would have brushed it away.

“I’ll catch the first ferry of the morning,” I told Dochsley, hoping he’d blame the near-drowning for my choked voice.

_(“Wait for me,” I’d told him)_

“I’m going on to Bressay.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am truly, deeply grateful for those of you reading. If you haven't noticed, I've updated my tags to better reflect how this piece turned out. This entire chapter was basically added to my original plan, so I would truly love to hear what y'all think. And I absolutely pinky promise that the characters are HAPPY in the end. Yes, really!

The little library looked older than the island itself.

Paint peeled from the centuries-old wooden boards, pounded by the spray of the sea. Wet, plastered feathers from seagulls’ wings mixed with earthy clay. Sagging weeds.

And the woman inside standing hunched over the crooked desk with a curved stoop was even older than the library and the island combined, older than the sea itself. Her skin was translucent, clinging to the curves of her veins. 

_(“thought I’d grown too old to have a first love,” he said to you one morning, as the sunrise struggled to break through the rotting floorboards of the deck above, and you held him, held his face, and said that you would have met each other even if the world collapsed, even if heaven fell, even if it was your last day alive, you would have met each other on the starboard deck as he brushed past your fluttering sleeve . . .)_

“Census records, you say?” she said. She eyed my face, my hair, my clothes with a roving stare. I hadn’t looked in a mirror since Dochsley pulled me from the waters, had only thrown on a new shirt and trousers and downed some under-steeped tea before rushing to the ferry docks to wait for the first boat to leave. A clump of dried sand still clung to the skin behind my ear.

“That’s right.”

“And you’re a policeman, you say? Big deal now to be a policeman down there in London parts, ain’t it so? Lot’s o’ cases there, crime and all sorts o’ sordid folks now, aren’t it? Sumthin’ to do with a case here on Bressay, now, eh? Imagine that, all the way up here from London parts, comin’ all th’way up North. . .”

I gripped the table hard so I wouldn’t tap my fingers. “Yes. Yes, something to do with a case. On Bressay.” I bent my head and gave an at-ease smile. Tried to slow down the rushing need in my voice. “If you’d be so kind.”

Her gnarled fingers shook over the water-stained pages of the giant ledger. There wasn’t a computer or even an electrical outlet in sight. “Well now, lad, I’ll be needin’ bit more information, you know, can’t read your mind, try as I might, and---”

“A sailor,” I said. “John. He lived here on the island---on Bressay, when he wasn’t at sea---”

“Lived? So this sailor is no longer livin’ now, eh?”

Hot breath suddenly choked the back of my throat. I swallowed. “No. He died.” I clenched my fist hidden in the arm of my wrinkled jacket. “He’s dead.”

(“How did you die?” I’d asked him last night in the motel room darkness, but he hadn’t answered. I was too far away for him to hear. The television next door had blared the next ad.)

The woman pushed her glasses up her nose and peered down at the pages. She didn’t even hum that she’d heard. 

“Right . . . well, sailor name o’ John, ain’t that specific I must say in these parts. He didnae give ye a surname or ---”

_(you were alone on the deck in the middle of the night when he first found you, exhausted against the railing with your head in your hands, and he asked if you were lost, but you weren’t, not anymore, and he said “they call me Hamish” when you asked just who he was, and daring filled you, boldness burning bright in your weary chest as you asked him “and what should I call you?” and his eyes went black as the sky as he whispered “just John, John Wat---”)_

“Watson. John Watson.”

_Griogair . . . I’m here . . ._

“Ah, was a Watson, then, eh?”

“John Hamish Watson, if that helps you narrow it down.”

_I’m here . . ._

(he had murmured to you the night of the storm, and you told him of secret things which had never before passed through your lips, and you asked to touch his bare skin, you never thought you’d grow the courage to ask, to want, but he kissed your fingertips and placed them in the hair on his chest in the quiet cabin, your aging hands on his toned skin)

She shook her head down at the ledger books. “Aye, e’en that name don’t quite narrow it down anymore, does it? Name like tha’ on these islands. Common name now, eh? Common folk. But let’s see what we can do here . . . You have a name o’ this ship he sailed on? A date, or --?”

A pulse over the earth, and the stones of the island shook. Heat flashed through my veins, and a call, a lonely call out over the sea, the caw of gulls.

_Remember . . ._

“Eighteen-thirteen,” I gasped, shocked at the words coming out of my own mouth.

She raised her eyebrows at me, with a look on her face like I’d just murdered her favorite cat. “Christ, lad, you didnae tell me we weren’t talkin’ bout just five year ago! Got to dig the old ledgers out the attic now, don’t I? Imagine, not even tellin’ me you’re huntin’ a man died two hundred year ago . . .”

_Hurry . . ._

“Ah, of course, I’m sorry,” I said, biting my tongue. I gestured to the attic stairs in the corner, arms crossed over my chest in a way I hoped was half-apologetic, half-cop. “I’ll wait.”

I waited for what felt like years, as the boom of the sea just beyond the window pounded through my blood, yanking on my bones. I waited as she chatted about the weather while slowly flipping through the stuck-together pages one by one. As she asked if I wanted any tea three separate times, and left to check on her sunflower sitting half-dead on the mantle, and asked me again if I was sure it wasn’t his first name that was Hamish.

_(he told you, you’re sure)_

“No, it’s--- it was John,” I said, anger and impatience and some other sharp emotion boiling in my chest. “John Hamish Watson. Sailor. Eighteen thirtee---”

“Ah! Here ya go!” She smacked her gnarled finger against one of the pages and looked up at me in triumph, knocking her glasses off her head and under the table. I bent down, scooped them up, and shoved them back in her hands as quickly as possible, and my own palms started to sweat as I waited for her to read more of the nearly-illegible writing sprawled across the page.

“Les’see here, born 1768 eh, o’ course, livin’ in tha’ buildin’ used to be standin’ near over Nina’s croft on the southeast end. Sailed on _The Calluna_ , looks like ---”

_(he told you about the first time he ever set sail, when he was only seven and he was afraid they would fall off the edge of the sea if they went too far, and how he never saw his family again after they waved him off with the new bag of coins in their pocket, coins for food, and he couldn’t read a word, you taught him the names of the letters that spelled out Calluna painted on the ship’s heaving sides, he held his head high and steady when he was embarrassed, and he cried in the dark the first time he recognized the ‘a’ in his own surname)_

“ _Calluna_ ,” I interrupted, vibrating through my limbs. “Right, then after that, the next sh---”

“Ah, be no ships comin’ after that,” she said. She had an odd gloss over her foggy eyes. “Lad never set foot offa that ship again, I tell ye.”

_I stayed . . . I waited . . ._

I didn’t even recognize the growl of my own voice. I lurched forward. “The ship went down?”

She sighed and tilted her head, as if her little sunflower had dropped another petal to the ground. “Nae, no sunken ships, but he didnae make it ashore. Say . . . is it ye are investigatin’ one of his descendants? Got crime runnin’ in the family? Though it don’t say he be havin’ any wife or child---”

“Crime?” The word shocked through my system as if I’d never heard it before. Like ice water splashing my face from a terrible dream where he waited for me . . . he waited . . .

“Aye. Crime. Says here: cause o’ death, thrown o’erboard. Caught stealin’. Shame they didnae teach them lads to swim in those days, but they mighta just shot inta the water to make sure anyway, you see. . .”

Her voice faded away into the eternal abyss, the void of nothing. All that existed on earth was the pounding blood through my veins, the water in my throat, the sandpaper over my tongue.

Stealing.

_(he tried to give it back to you, he tried and tried, your great-grandfather’s golden compass passed through generations, the family jewel, but you placed it back in his hands hidden between your bodies so it wouldn’t glint in the bright sun, so it wouldn’t give the two of you away on the crowded deck that last morning, and the sun broke through the clouds just when you dropped anchor in the port at Glasgow, and he slipped it into his pocket as he begged you in the smallest whisper to stay, to go on with him, to start anew in his home, in his bed_

_you left him standing there in a sweatstained shirt_

_“I’ll come for you,” you told him, “wait for me,” you said, but you thought he didn’t believe it, thought he knew you might not make it_

_that the glinting gold buried in his pocket might be goodbye)_

“He died in the sea,” I said, barely hearing my own watery voice. “He drowned.”

The woman glanced up at the tone in my voice, the warble in my throat. 

“More likely was in the bay at Lerwick, ya know,” she said, as if she was telling me how to make her favorite pie. “Not out in th’open sea. Wouldnae made the records if they weren’t people ta see it.”

Her lazy eye traced the bags I could feel under my own, the fresh lines of worry painted around my stunned mouth. She didn’t say the word ‘crime’ anymore. Confusion lit up her squinting eyes.

“‘Twas mos’ likely a quick death,” she went on in a quiet voice, one that sounded like pins dropping onto the silent wood floor. “See here, lad, they would shoot ‘em ta make sure they were dead and gone. Woulda been quick like. Not all the mess o’ drownin’.”

_(you knew, you knew it two whole years later when you finally wrote off a letter in an unsteady hand, knowing he couldn’t read it but hoping he would understand that it was you, that it was yours, that you’d realized you would die if you didn’t step on a ferry and come, and you asked if he would still open up his home (his life, his bed) and you sent it off with wild hope in your chest that it would find him on Calluna, on Bressay, at his croft, somewhere out on the open sea, and when the letter came back six months later saying that the sailor known as Hamish Watson was good and dead, you didn’t know the how or the when or the where_

_but you dropped your full teacup onto the stone floor of your Glasgow home, it shattered_

_you looked at your revolver on the table for a long time, and it was loaded, you went out for a walk in the rain instead)_

“Excuse me,” I shot out. I had no idea how long I’d been standing in silence. The look on her face said it must have been for an uncomfortable amount of time. “Excuse me --- thank you, but I . . . you know, the case, I really must be on.”

I barely heard her called out farewell over my shoulder, barely felt the door of the library fling open and slam, the wet rocks beneath my boots, the water from the skies. I ran, half stumbling, coat flailing behind me, until the distant bay of Lerwick across the waters came into view, peeking out of the hushing fog by the twinkle of town lights. I peered over the edge of the rocky cliff, the craggy black, until I made out the white-foamed tips of the waves crashing against the island far below.

_(deep blue eyes as large as the sea . . . in the sea . . .)_

I wrapped my arms around my chest against the icy cold. The wind thwacked and groaned in my ears beside the harsh pant of my lungs.

Clouds trembled. 

Distantly, hidden in the hiss of the sea, a man screamed. A body plunked into the waves. 

Ribbons of red.

“Was it quick?” I asked into thin air. The salt coated my numb lips.

And just when I feared my voice would go forever unanswered, the rushing moan sounded, the thrum across the ceased waves. The pronging hum.

_Listen_ over my shoulder, an invisible footstep cracking the rocks. Breath that was not my own. Hovering, creeping, crunch.

A swallow over the gale.

“Were you in pain?” I breathed, nearly doubled over my own chest. My heartbeat rushed in time to the shivers up my spine, the hairs on the back of my neck blowing in a damp puff of invisible air. Everything was frozen, everything was lost, everything was ---

Warm hands covered my back from the freezing wind, protecting my shoulders.

I sighed at the touch. Melted into the rocks. 

Water flooded my exhausted eyes. I closed them, and a golden face hovered before me. Stubbled cheeks.

_Oh, Griogair . . ._ he said, and his lips moved with the words. Dry thin lips that had been kissed and licked by the sun and sea.

_(by you)_

And there was sadness in his eyes --- an answer I wished I hadn’t seen.

A choked moan escaped my chest, and a sharp sob pierced my lungs. I swallowed it down, fighting against the ice of the wind, leaning back into his broad chest.

Age spots on my hands. Kissed deep lines.

_(by him)_

“Are you cold?” I whispered, because I couldn’t stand the thought of John Watson being cold at the bottom of the sea, trapped forever beneath the waves with the terrifying icy waters endlessly punishing his wailing bones. I couldn’t stand the thought of him shivering among the kelp, suffering as he stared at the ever-changing shore, waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting . . .

_My love, listen to me,_ he whispered in my ear, hot breath on my cheek, and the honeyed rum of his brogue. And his hands on my shoulders, bracing me from the pounding spray of the sea. My toes hanging over the cliff’s edge.

Lips brushed my skin. 

_I’m nae cold. You came._

“I came . . .” I breathed.

The world began again. The wind exploded, and the waves burst, and the spray pierced across my face.

And John Watson was at my back, holding me firm, swaying, his arms across my chest, his thighs steadying my legs, and the roar of the restless sea hummed and rattled in my bones, the pull of the deep, and I could keep John’s bones warm if I laid my own body beside them, over them, covering them, keeping them safe between myself and the lost sand, protecting him from the thrash of the waters until my own bones clattered against his, forever joined, and they would find us at the end days when they finally drained the seas, my body and hi---

“Stop!”

_Come . . ._ as a whisper in my memories. I took one step closer to the air, my foot dangling in the rolling fog.

“Don’t jump, man! Stop!”

His warm arms slipped from my body, replaced by the wild thrash of gruff hands. They yanked me back from the rocky edge, throwing me to the wet ground. My head slapped against moss-covered stone with a deafening crack.

“Christ, man, thought you was lookin’ to jump. You insane?”

_I’m tired, my love . . ._

Stars exploded in my eyes as I lurched to my feet, throwing the stranger’s hands off my coat with a growl. 

“Leave me be,” I hissed. “Not bloody jumping.”

_(he asked what you were scared of, and you lied and told him snakes, and he never knew that the blue of his eyes terrified you out of your wits, that the way your body jumped and surged and arched under his hands was the most horrifying thing (the most beautiful thing), and when you asked him what he was scared of he laughed and said drowning, “bit funny, ain’t it? livin’ at sea and afraid o’ touchin’ the water”_

_but you were not afraid of drowning, you realized this midway through your walk in the rain when you stopped near the cliffs, when you imagined getting a running start, when you thought of his careful hands_

_you went home, it was time for another cup of tea, needed to clean the floor)_

“Stay away from the bloody edge, then! Christ! The hell were you ---”

_Griogair . . . I don’t know how much longer . . ._

“Fuck off, yeah?!”

“Fuck you! Just tryin’ to help, ya bleedin’---”

_I’ve been waiting . . ._

“Fuck off!” I screamed again. I left the stranger behind me in a rage back at the cliff. I’d never even seen his face. Didn’t thank him or shake his hand.

I was running, sprinting, flying across the rocks. A wild plan formulated in my mind with every frantic step. The earth was pounding, the air muffling groans into my ears, the sky choking my limbs. 

Every head looked up when I slammed the station door behind me. I had absolutely no memory of taking the ferry back to Lerwick, of walking up to the station, of flashing my badge at the entrance desk.

“Christ, sir! Look like you were caught out in that storm, what did you --”

“Hell, Lestrade! Who are you thinkin’ you are, I’ve tried to call --”

“Dochsley told us about last night, sir, are you alright? Sir!”

I waved them all off and stalked to my desk, madly rifling through paperwork to try and remember why I was even there. Something about London and drug deals and bodies. Something about the shore. No eyes. Strangled necks.

Then, “Fucking Christ, mate, what in hell did you do to yer hair?”

I looked up at Gillian’s shocked voice booming across the small room, littered with case reports and old coffee cups and photos of victims on slabs. Victims half-buried in the sand.

“My hair?”

Something in my mind, something from the night before, Dochsley in the car . . .

Shock and indignation exploded across her face. Her mouth hung open. You could hear a pin drop.

“Yes, Greg, your hair. You go and dye it and somethin’ went wrong? Gettin’ yer early start at Halloween? Quarter-life crisis since you almost went and died?”

I peered around the frozen room, and cold ice trickled down my back at the concern plastered across everyone’s faces. Mouths hung slightly open. Blank eyes stared.

“Didn’t touch my bloody hair,” I muttered as I whirled around to the loo. I raised my voice over my shoulder. “I’ll be on another watch tonight. Don’t wait for me in the morning.”

A chorus, slamming against my back like the screaming tide:

“Need to get a night off, sir, your sleep!”

“After last night? Doesn’t make any sense to go--”

“‘S not safe, sir! It’s not needed!”

“At least take a team with --”

“Stop right there.”

For the second time that day, I had a hand grabbing my sleeve. Gillian yanked me back, then forced herself in front of me to block me from the loo door. The red around her eyes matched the shade of her hair.

“Look here,” she hissed. Immediately, my spine tensed. And in that moment, I wished John was with me, that he was holding my hand, guiding me through ---

“I don’ know what kinda stunt you’re pullin’ -- the fallin’ off the map and the lyin’ face down in the sea and the not answerin’ your mobile. But whatever the fuck this is, you knock it off. Now.”

She looked ten stories tall, and her eyes bore into mine. I imagined John’s arms against my spine so I wouldn’t cower. 

_(he taught you to climb the mast once, just before dawn when everyone but the other sailors on watch were asleep, and he held you around your waist, hidden from all the world by the sails bursting in the fresh wind, he held you as you flung out your arms and felt like you were young again, terrified and triumphant and flying through the skies, the sunrise over the waters, and you were gazing out at the entire world, but he was only looking at you, and the wrinkles under his eyes turned brilliant gold)_

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say. The anger immediately deflated from her eyes. She looked at me with pity.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, whispering so it wouldn’t echo back into the investigation room, “Just . . . you know, this case. My first big one. Got a bit wrapped up.”

Empathy in her eyes. She touched my arm. “Don’t think I don’ know that,” she whispered, leaning a bit too close. “Just worried about ye is all. What happened last night, was scared to death when Dochsley called. Don’ want you out there alone again . . .”

_(John’s body broken and alone at the bottom of the sea, cold and gasping for air, and still he waited . . . waited . . .)_

“Right,” I said lamely. I shrugged my shoulders. “Just want to be out there another hour, is all. Don’t need a team.” I tried to smile. “I’ll be careful.”

She grinned.

_(he grinned at you when you spotted your first whale, breaching above the restless waters, and the wind rustled the white blond strands of his soft hair, you wanted to run your fingers through it, just once)_

“Only for an hour, then? Tonight?”

“Just for an hour.”

She nodded towards the loo. “Fine then, go and have a wash o’er that face a yours. You know you look like you gone and aged a hundred years since you been here, eh? All covered in grime like bean-nighe. Probably ‘cus you havnae slept in five days.” She winked. “Go on, then.”

The wink sailed past me. I didn’t respond as I brushed open the loo door and made my way to the sink, leaning my hands along the cool porcelain.

I waited until I heard the heels she always wore inside the station clomp away through the door, then I looked straight up at the mirror.

Shock. Horror.

_(“you beauty,” he once whispered to you, tracing your crow’s feet with the pad of his thumb, and you wanted to laugh, but instead it was deadly serious, the way his weathered eyes traced your face the way he knew how to scan the sea, and you wanted to tell him that you were a washed up shell of a man, older than him by nearly a decade, and that your belly and thighs were too soft, and that you’d forgotten how to feel that flutter inside of you, that want, it had been so devastatingly long, but instead you said “you are every sunrise I’ve seen from this ship” and he begged you to press inside him for the very first time, clung to your spine_

_came on those same belly and thighs and whispered praise to the Lord above)_

I looked wrecked. Decades of age had somehow ripped my face into sagging crags, streaks of dirty silver through my hair, and the exhaustion in my eyes. I looked nothing like the man who had held his head high just one month ago at the promotion ceremony with the new badge on his chest. Nothing like the man in the Detective’s ID photograph kept safe in my breast pocket.

_I’m so tired, my love_ whispered like the outline of a ghost through the echoing stalls. Water dripped from a leaking pipe onto the cold floor, the hiss and slap of the white tile. A bead of invisible water slid down the back of my shivering neck.

_Please . . ._

And I watched, eyes wide, as the faint ghost of a hand appeared before me in mid-air, shimmering in the light of the mirror as it hovered, stretched its fingers. 

It brushed the hair back from my face, and my moan echoed across the ceiling. The palm cupped my cheek.

_(scars on his palms from the rope burns you watched him get, and he was bleeding onto the deck, nobody else even looked, and you couldn’t run to him then, couldn’t kiss the wounds, couldn’t scream for help, and he shrugged it off, but you saw his fingers shaking as he tied them with extra rags_

_later, you kissed them, hidden in the dark, and he told you that nobody had ever done that for him before)_

The ice of the porcelain had turned my own hands numb. A tear slammed into the bottom of the sink, out of rhythm with the dripping pipe. My breath choked.

_Come, rest with me . . . it’s been so long . . ._

The hand traced my wet eyelids before brushing an icy thumb across my open lips, dipping into my mouth, a bone across my tongue.

_Come . . ._

I somehow knew, just minutes later as the front station door slammed shut behind me, that I would never enter through that shining door again.

 

\--

 

The shore was abandoned. Not even the gulls circled above in the misting air.

I stood at the edge of the sand in those thickest hours before dawn, when all the island slept, and even the waves tried to hush their sound. 

And I did not hesitate as I shrugged off my heavy jacket against the cold. As my fingers calmly danced over the buttons of my shirt. I slipped the tie from around my neck, peeled and shrugged off the wrinkled cotton from my skin. I folded them all neatly, placed them on a flat patch of dry sand off to the side. My belt, my trousers, leather work shoes and socks. My pants.

When all were folded, I stood straight and tall in the icy darkness, not cringing away even as the wind slapped my bare chest and thighs, shivering up through my bones. Curling my toes.

_(“touch me,” he begged you, you ran your hands over his ribs the way he liked, kissed across his chest, the trail of hair down his shaking stomach, and he whispered it again, and again, and again, and by the hundredth time you realized nobody else had ever heard him say those words before, nobody dead or alive, that he had saved them over forty years just for you, trapped in the grimy belly of the steaming ship, for you)_

I stepped into the water. Choked down a shocked breath. 

Another step, and another, until my ankles and calves were being sucked down by the frothing foam, licked and swallowed into the sea of ice. The sharp rocks and coral shells cracked against the bare skin of my feet, piercing into the soles. Stung my frozen skin.

Skin painted white by the foggy moon as I disappeared inch by inch into the ink black waters. Waves lapped across my trembling thighs, over my hips. Slaps of ice crawled up my stomach and chest, and sprays of foam blasted into my face. 

My steps never paused. I looked straight ahead.

I finally halted when I was chest-deep, teeth chattering down through my lurching chest. Arms trembling out at my sides. Toe-tips clutching to the barest hints of the murky bottom, slick with mud and weed.

And I would have thought that I’d had it all gloriously wrong, that the water would punish me slowly, and that I would be alone. That he would never see me standing there waiting for him for the very first time, except:

“John?” I called out. My voice broke on the beautiful sound. “John?”

A body before me.

With a great flash of swirling light that hummed across the sea, there was suddenly a man, John Watson, flesh and bone in the heaving waves. Opaque, tanned skin and velvet hair. Blessed lines.

His eyes shone. He sucked in a singing breath and looked up at my face.

“Is it really you?” he whispered. His fingertips shook against my cheek.

_(you were the one who was scared, who left him alone on the starboard deck, who never came)_

“It’s me,” I breathed, in a voice that neither of us could even hear.

He gasped, and a tear escaped from each eye. “God above,” he whispered. His voice washed over me in a gust of longing warmth, surrounding each of my muscles and bones with the forgotten heat from his breath.

He took my face in his warm, weathered hands, soft calluses on my jaw. His thumb traced the new lines carved about my mouth. Fingers brushed and dove through the grey in my hair.

“You beauty,” he told me, shaking his head with unbelievable awe, and the waves swallowed us whole, and the moon quivered, and the stars shone.

And he kissed me.

I gasped into his wet mouth as his slick tongue traced my lips. I let him taste me, opened to his rushing heat, the tiny wet moans and licks of his mouth on mine.

Solid and warm and real and alive and ---

“Come,” he told me. He gripped my hands in his, and his nose nuzzled mine as he slowly lead me deeper into the sea, pulling me through the waves. He held my jaw in his hand and pressed wet kisses to my neck, the shadows of grey beneath my eyes, the shell of my ear. My skin fizzled and sang.

_(you remember the the rust and the wood and the burlap and the amber, the shrill of the ship’s whistle, the way the bone broth from his meals lingered in his sweet mouth, how you fit into his hands)_

“My love,” he whispered as he held me, as we walked, as we faded away. “Please . . . come.”

I went.

I let him lead me into the swelling waters, until my feet were pulled away from the solid ground. The ocean heaved beneath us, frothing about my limbs, and I realized that she was supporting us in her watery arms, holding us aloft in her bosom within the curtains of salt and fog.

I looked at John Watson, staring at me as if I somehow deserved the look in his brimming eyes, as if I, Gregory Lestrade, had once massaged his tired back, or had once washed his hair. As if I had held him against my bare chest until he woke up with the dawn.

And nobody had ever looked at me like that in my whole life, as if I were the reason the sun rose each blessed morning, and I were the reason the tides continued to roll and lap at the rocky shores. 

He lead me, until I was standing on the solid sea herself, waist deep in her waves. He lead me with his thumb tracing across the pulsing vein in my wrist.

I wasn’t cold.

When I kissed him back, really kissed him, the stars above trembled and fell. The wind hushed in awe. When I undid the buttons of his cotton shirt, my fingers were steady. When I untied the trousers about his firm waist, my mind was clear.

“Touch me,” he whispered. He ran his hands all the way up my back and shoulders, my neck and my scalp. He pressed my cheek down into his bared chest and breathed up at the sky. “Please . . . touch me.”

And then I saw it.

The bullet hole was small and clean, as if he’d been born with it carved straight into his chest, just beneath his bared left shoulder.

The world went black.

“Oh God,” I moaned. My hand hovered over it, afraid to touch it, terrified that it would explode in pain and blood at the press of my fingers. “Oh God, you . . . they ---”

“Shh . . .”

He lifted my shaking palm and pressed it to his lips, then settled my hand directly over the hole pierced into his skin. He held me there. It was straight above his heart, and yet I felt no beat. No flutter of pulse.

“Was quick,” he whispered, deathly loud across the still ocean.

_(he lied to you once before, you saw the odd emotion flash through his eyes, when he told you that he was happy with his life, that he didn’t miss the shore, that clearly he was born to be a man married to the sea, and that was that)_

I leaned down, boldness thrumming through my core, and I lifted my hand away and kissed his chest. My lips caressed the raised lines of the scar. He cried out in a breathless moan deep from his throat, cupping the back of my head.

“John,” I murmured into his skin. “John . . .”

And the hair on my chest drifted against his in the rolling water as he pressed our bodies together, bare and joined from calf to neck. My shocked gasp echoed between us. Water dripped from his eyelashes and lips. And I licked the salt from his skin, breathed in the hot scent of him beneath his ear.

“Christ, love,” he moaned. His voice was the texture of all my memories, the color of the thread that was woven through the depths of my mind. It was the scaffolding of my chest, the mortar between my bones. It was the unnamed color of the sky, perfect and true, when my body longed for a word more beautiful and whole than simply ‘blue’.

I clutched him to me and whispered his name, let the sounds drip from my tongue straight onto his wet skin. I let my palm slide down his back, tracing his spine, dipping down into the wet heat of his ---

“Yeah, love, like tha’ . . . come with me, just like that . . . God . . .”

_(he used to do that, you remember, you remember how he murmured burning secret words into your ear, how he used to make you shut your eyes against the brightness of his skin, his words flaming wild heat between your legs_

_hard)_

“Right there, love,” he panted as our bodies rolled, as his wet nipples brushed over my own with shivering sparks. “Come on. There . . . Christ, touch me now, love. My Gr ---”

I grabbed his face in my hands and kissed him with a groan, cutting off the rest of the name. I kissed him hard enough that our teeth slammed, hard enough that my fingertips dug into the stubble across his jaw, hard enough that a gasped curse escaped into my mouth, that he bit me and held on and tugged me down across his skin.

(We were sinking, I was already chest-deep, but it didn’t matter.)

He looked into my eyes and didn’t let me look away when he reached forward, fingertips trailing down my stomach, across my trembling thighs. He didn’t let me blink when his palm finally cupped my cock, letting me rest full and heavy in his worn fingers. He gripped me, pulsing and hot in a way I couldn’t remember ever feeling before. Ran his thumb along my erection. Pulled me closer through the tight pressure of his fist. The memorized rough spots hidden on his gentle hands.

I stared at him. Hot tears flooded into my eyes. Our lips were so close I could survive on just his oxygen alone.

“John,” I whispered. He closed his eyes and sighed at the sound.

(Neck-deep. Water splashing into my nose and mouth. None of it mattered at all.)

“John,” I said again, as I let myself arch deeper into his hand, tingling at the pressure around me, the thrumming pulse aching through my cock with every slick pull of his palm. And he caressed me, stroked my hair as if it were made of deep brown silk, sighed curses and praises into my ear, ran his wet cheek across my own.

(Water thrashed between us, churning, frothing, choking, lapping around my chin and panting lips, but . . .)

“Christ, the feel a’ you,” he breathed. “Back in my hand. Good God, love, I missed ye . . .” His voice choked. “My love, I waited . . .”

_(he called you that only once when he was alive, and you were someone else (were you someone else?), and the word rushed like fire across your skin, the crooning caress of the soft sea, and you willed your throat, willed your mouth, willed your lips to say it back, tried and tried in silence as he looked at you huddled nose to nose against the burlap, rolling with the ship, and when you were silent with your palm on his chest and his watch on deck was starting soon_

_he kissed you for a long time, didn’t say it again)_

I gasped for breath, shaking at the building heat in my erection, and I felt the hot, slick slide of his own cock pressed into my hip, rolling across my skin, thrusting over my muscle and bone. Thick and real.

“I’m here,” I panted, because I couldn’t think of anything else I could possibly say to him, this man who understood the secret words I’d never even told myself, and who wanted to hold and kiss me in the middle of the sea.

(Water in my mouth, over my face, dragging me down, filling my nose and lungs, gurgling in my throat, coughing, but . . .)

John’s mouth was on mine, steady and slow. His hands roved over my body, keeping me close to him as we sank. And I realized, with a flash of emotion punching through my chest, that I was breathing through his kisses, that he was somehow letting his own body fill my lungs with the air to breathe.

Naked and tangled and wet, his hand on me, his body along mine, and he was kissing me with such power I closed my eyes against the murky blue of the sea, remembered the shape of his face through memory alone, the soft outline of his lips, the slope of his nose.

Kissing me.

_(when he kissed you for the first time it was just a brush, just a touching of dry lips carried by on a breath, just an impossible moment, and you wondered years later when you lay dying of old age in your bed, when you were there alone weeping with joy at the thought of seeing him up in the sky in a few short hours (in a few short seconds), you wondered whether John Watson ever understood, whether he ever realized, that on that night even though he was the one who leaned forward, and he was the one who said he was sorry in that shattering moment of pause, and he was the one who licked his lips and leaned in again_

_that really you kissed him first, it was you)_

I wasn’t cold.

And I wasn’t afraid, even though the tangled weeds were licking at my ankles, strapped around my thighs. Even though John was pressing me into the soft floor of the ocean, rocking against my body, holding me in his arms, and I could no longer see the light from the moon break through the waters to light the surface, could no longer feel the edges of my own body, my fingers and limbs, but I could feel his lips humming his quiet love across my mouth, the hidden passion of my marrow, the lost sound of his name.

_Griogair_ he called me as the water pressed against my bones, his bare body wrapped around mine, and they would find us at the end of times, when they finally drained the seas, they would see me being kissed in John Watson’s strong arms, his sweet hands on my skin, where I was meant to ---

Rocks slapped against my back. My lungs burst and squeezed. My throat screamed.

I gasped awake and lurched, heaving water and mud into the wet sand beside me. Oxygen flooded my throat in a shocking wave.

I blinked the saltwater out of my eyes, desperate to see who had pulled me from the deep, terrified that it would be Dochsley, that it was still yesterday, that none of this had even ---

“Breathe!” I heard, yelled into my face. 

_(the first word he ever said to you when you stood in the middle of the ship on the second day, and you thought you would be sick on the deck, and he walked by, coils of rope in his hands, bulging his bare arms, and he laughed and said “breathe” as he pressed against your sleeve, and when you looked up and saw it was him, the man from the mast, something odd pinched in your chest_

_and he was walking away, no longer laughing, looking straight back at you)_

He begged.

“Please, love, come on. For me. Breathe!”

My eyes flung open. John Watson leaned over me, terror in his eyes, hands pressed against my chest.

Only, I could see the stars shining through his face in a hazy glow. I couldn’t feel the weight of his hands where they gripped my body and skin.

“No!” I called out, for some devastating, unknowable reason, as more of the breaking grey sun shone through his hair. Sudden desperation burned in my throat like hot wax.

He cupped my face in cold wisps of air. He was crying, but I couldn’t feel the tears splashing down onto my face from his watery cheeks.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I . . . I can’t do . . . I can’t.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head, then leaned forward to press his forehead to mine. But when he did, only a cold wind blew through me, straight through my brow. I reached up wildly to grab his arms and back, but my fingers clutched at the air.

I was freezing. The wind bit at my bare skin, and the sand prickled my with grains of ice. I watched him try to calm my shaking body with his hands, but every touch from his fingers was a gale of cold across my skin.

Finally, he pulled his hands away. His eyes shone against his skin made of dawn sky.

“No,” I heard myself moaning, pleading. “No, no no . . .”

_You’re dying_ he moaned across the sand, straight into my chest. _You’re too cold . . ._

“Let me be cold,” I breathed. “John, John please, let me---”

_I love you . . ._ whispered across my wet eyes. _Oh, my love, you came . . ._

“I’m still here,” I gasped. My body shook as a sob broke free from my chest. I reached out for the last traces of his eyes fading away into the cloudy sky, gripping madly at the air. 

“Please don’t leave me.” The tide kissed at my toes. “John, please don’t lea---”

His face flickered back for only a moment, and the barest hint of his solid nose rested against mine. He sighed into my face. 

He drew in breath with a wet gasp. “You have to live. For me.”

_(you lived without him before, you lived for years and years and only held that revolver in your hands one time, when a ship came into port decades later, and Calluna was painted on her sides, and you remembered how it felt to wake up while being held, remembered how he taught you to read the tides, remembered the hollow of his throat where it peeked out from his shirt way up in the mast in the Spanish breeze)_

“Please,” I begged. I could barely see. 

The pressure of his hands was back on my face. I leaned into the touch. 

“You didnae look like this when you first heard me from the shore,” he whispered in a heavy voice. His fingertips traced the aged lines across my face, the silver streaks through my hair, the grey under my eyes. 

_Oh, love . . ._ dripping with weary sadness. With regret.

Lips pressed to my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks. Lips hidden in my hair. And I felt my skin tightening, the lines of my body growing firmer, my bones realigning to how they were just a few days ago, only everything was wrong now. Everything glaring and incorrect.

I was panting. I swallowed a moan as the warm lips faded from my scalp. “Please . . .” I searched for his lost face over the horizon. “Please, I can’t lose you.”

The last wisp of his palm pressed warmth into my cheek, then on my chest.

_You won’ lose me . . ._

A final kiss pressed to my lips, an invisible mouth. I trembled beneath it, holding my breath. Terrified to move, to shatter him back into fog. I closed my eyes just as his lips faded from mine.

_Goodbye . . ._ in a terrible, wet voice. A drop on my face.

_(neither of you said goodbye on the deck of the ship, you know, the last thing you heard was him being chastised for standing around, and by the time you looked back from the bottom of the gangplank, sick to your stomach with your vision going grey, he was already gone, and you searched for him among the masts for eternal minutes, but you never found him, and you stepped forward to sprint back onto the ship, to hell with it all_

_they were already sailing away)_

“Please,” I begged in a rough voice. “Don’t leave me. Don’t go . . .”

Fistfuls of dry sand. The infant sun on my skin.

_Oh, my love . . .my love, you came . . ._

“John!” I wailed.

I heard nothing back.

My coat draped over my bare body, floating impossibly towards me on the breeze. My trousers pooled over my thighs in a heap, dropped from the sky.

“John,” I whispered.

But the only thing that answered me was the fresh call of the waves, obliviously lapping at the shore with crackling foam. 

“He was scared,” I said in the smallest voice into the sand. Grains flooded my mouth, covered my cheek. “I was scared.”

And the gulls were awake, soaring gloriously through the skies. The sun rose.

“Wait . . .” I breathed, just as the sunlight poured across the surface of the sea. The rays pierced down through the thick, black waters, illuminating a lonely skeleton of bones lost forever in the kelp and weeds.

And as I finally watched the prow of the first ship of the day come into view, and struggled to my hands and knees to pull on my clothes before anyone found me, I knew with certainty that it was the most terrible sunrise I had ever seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! At risk of sounding like a loser, I'll just say that I would truly appreciate to know how you may have enjoyed this chapter :) I know this is a pretty niche fic, and the readership is small but mighty, so every bit of feedback is so special to me, and really helps motivate me to finish out this side story!
> 
> Again, I PINKY PROMISE THE CHARACTERS ARE HAPPY IN THE END <3 See you again soon!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've reached the end!
> 
> Heads up that this chapter contains the most 'on screen' suicidal thoughts, with a happy reminder that it is actually a happy / hopeful ending with no new death. I promise.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

Nobody ever tells you what it’s like to live while you’re dead.

Because I _was_ dead. I was a ghost roaming through the halls of my own life, idly watching each second, each hour, each day that passed since John Watson kissed me for the last time and silently faded away.

Six days. Fourteen hours. Eleven seconds. Twelve.

I wished John had prepared me for the way all my food would taste of ash, that the thin tea Dochsley or Gillian handed to me at my desk would run down my throat like useless tar and oil, scratching my insides into rubble and smoke. I wished he had told me that the rare Shetland sunlight would never shine full the strength of its warmth upon my skin, that I would itch in my clean pressed clothes, clammy and cold. 

That I would hear my own voice as if from far, far away, interviewing this and press-conference-announcing that, and meanwhile all my insides would be attuned to the lost hum, listening for the silent whisper, endlessly, uselessly scanning the dark horizon of the foggy sea—the sea which had never looked so flat and empty before. So dead and forbidding.

_(he told you to remember his voice, to remember the way it sounded when he whispered your name, that it would bring you back to him, and he laughed in a thin way when he told you it would remind you to get on a blasted ship from Glasgow to Bressay as soon as you could, and you said that it would, that you’d get on that blasted ship, and remember his voice, but you’d already forgotten the way his tongue would roll over the sounds as you stood there watching the ship sail away_

_you can’t remember anything else)_

That I wouldn’t hear his voice anymore.

Because that was the bloody problem—I _wasn’t_ dead. Not at all. I wasn’t covering his beautiful bones at the bottom of the sea, keeping them safe from the fish and the thrashing of the tides. I wasn’t kissing him, promising him that I came, I came, I came. I wasn’t his Griogai—

Seven days. Twenty three hours. Four seconds. Five.

No. I was alive, racing down the one lane highway with Gillian and Dochsley just before midnight, chasing a break in the case. She laughed with adventure out the rolled-down window, wind in her flaming hair. Dochsley whooped from the backseat.

“Gonna be the break we need, sir!” he called over the roar of the engine. “I can feel it!”

Gillian’s pale fingers pulled some of the whipping hair back from her face. She grinned at me with shining eyes. “Can hardly believe you pulled this one off, Lestrade,” she joked. “Was only ‘bout a week ago you were lyin’ face down in the sea like a bloody baby, and now this?”

I watched her eyes trace the front of my clean, fitted suit in the faint light of the car. Freshly pressed in my motel room that morning right after I actually ate breakfast and shaved. She was teasing me. Proud of me. I forced a lopsided grin and tightened my grip on the wheel.

“Maybe it was just sheer dumb luck,” I said, screeching us around another turn towards the distant croft that hopefully housed our suspect, hunkered down. The police cars following us blasted the thick air with their siren wails, and the flashing red and blue of the lights lit up the ghostly moors like an electric rave.

Her fingers suddenly landed on my thigh—pale gold against the fresh black of my pressed trousers. She squeezed. “I don’ think it’s got anathing to do with luck,” she said, giving me a piercing look through her whipping hair. She winked.

_(did he ever wink at you? maybe, maybe, maybe once as you walked past him on the crowded deck when he was hauling thick rope to hoist the sails, or maybe once when you asked him when you could see him again as he snuck out of your room before dawn, or maybe once in the dark where you couldn’t even see_

_but you don’t remember any of these maybe’s, not a thing)_

I swallowed down a piercing burn in my throat and subtly shifted my leg on the accelerator so she would slip her fingers off my thigh. She did.

“Well, you know, just . . . following the trail,” I said lamely. “Doin’ the job. Being the big boss.”

She grinned, as if my answer was the most wonderfully adorable thing she’d ever heard. The most magnificently humble. She didn’t say anything back.

And John never warned me how physically painful the stab of longing would feel in my chest when I looked out once more over the raging sea as we stepped out of the squad car, Gillian and Dochsley and the rest of the unit already racing towards the farmhouse, heads raised and weapons drawn. 

He never told me how I would want to sink to my knees and wail deep in my throat when I wildly scanned the grey horizon through the thick black, praying that the waters would rise up in the shape of a human form, or that the entire sea would blink as a giant, blue eye, swallowing me whole.

But nothing surged up into the sky. Nothing blinked.

He wasn’t there. He wasn’t watching me, calling to me, waiting. He was just . . . _gone_ , and I never thought the ocean could be so utterly soulless. So menacing. Never thought the salt spray could feel like suffocating mud on my face, clogging down the wail caught in my throat. Like acid.

I missed his hands. Missed the icy puff of his breath on my nape. Missed his moan on the waters. His wet skin. His fingertip dipping into my eye. His—

“Sir!”

Dochsley screamed at me from where they’d already kicked down the barn door and rushed in, clearing half the place. I looked at the rest of the property, reeling as if stepping out of a blinding fog, and saw that the suspect was already lying flat on his stomach on the ground on the porch, his hands behind his back, the team clinking his wrists in cuffs. 

“Sir! Sir?”

_(did he ever call you that in front of the others, when he accidentally (purposely?) bumped into you in the crowded, molding cabins, or when he accidentally (purposely?) stepped on your toe when rushing past? did he bow his head to you and call you that so that no one would see, no one would suspect?_

_did it hurt you as badly then?)_

“Calm your tits, Dochsley,” I groaned, finally tearing my eyes away from the flat, ghostless sea. 

_(did he call you, but you couldn’t hear it over the sound of the raid? did he walk across the waves but you blinked? did he kiss you but you thought it was the wind?_

_did he?)_

Dochsley jogged up to me, cheeks flushed and eyes bright. “Cor, sir, you missed it all! Had a right time of it gettin’ ‘im subdued and all. But what a night!” He beamed at me, then immediately sobered at what must have been the most unenthusiastic look on my face. He glanced quickly at where I’d been staring over the cliffs towards the water. “Fancy that, you watching the scenery in the dead of night, missing catchin’ your famous killer . . .”

He laughed nervously, edging closer to me like he was afraid I would fling myself from the rocks and jump. His face looked the same way it had that night in the car, when I’d been soaking wet and covered in frozen kelp instead of dressed in a suit, and his face had been illuminated by lonely street lights and the moon instead of an army of squad car headlights directed at the barn.

I checked my phone and radio like I used to see all my bosses doing after a successful arrest, then flagged down Gillian in the distance, gesturing to the car. “Just didn’t feel like doing all the dirty work for once,” I said to Dochsley, walking back into the chaos ahead of him. I smirked—  
at least, I tried to. “That’s your mess now.”

He suddenly brightened again, as if we were sharing an uproarious private joke about my promotion, and about his place at the bottom of the ladder. “Right you are, Sir,” he said, shooting me a wink. 

And John never warned me about how my bones would feel like brittle piles of dust and mold as I stood up at the podium bright and fresh the next morning, facing the cameras and the microphones and the crowd. My first press conference. He never told me that I wouldn’t be able to hear the words coming out of my own mouth, that Gillian and Dochsley’s smiles directed at me from the sidelines would physically burn my fragile skin, scorching until it peeled back from my rotting bones and piled into smoldering ash on the stage floor.

He never told me how their slaps on my back when we gathered up our paperwork from the station later that night would split my muscles in two, nearly throwing me to the ground. How the sky would thud heavily on my shoulders like a dull weight, and the air would smell of burning tires and asphalt, and the salt spray of the sea in the air would blind my eyes. Drip down my ears. Snake down my throat.

He never _said_.

_(what else did he tell you? what else did he never say? his secrets and his mother’s name and his favorite meal to have on dry land and where he liked you to kiss him best? whether he was as afraid of being shot in the chest as he was of drowning? whether he believed in ghosts?_

_you don’t know, you’ll never know, and maybe you never knew)_

“See you first light for the ferry back then, Sir?” 

I looked up, squinting through the fluorescents, and my suit suddenly felt far too tight around my chest. And too loose. 

“What—oh, right. Yeah, ‘course.”

Dochsley frowned at me from where he stood holding a giant box filled with paperwork from the case, straight on his way to the local pub with half the team. He looked like a student just finished their last blissful day of uni. His tie hung loose and open around his neck, and his hair was mussed. 

“What, did you forget, Sir? Changed your mind at all ‘bout this desolate slab a rock? Buy yourself a little cottage?”

“Ah, cool it,” Gillian groaned from where she was slipping her cardigan over her shoulders. “The man probably just wanted to sleep in for once after dealing with all yer nonsense for two weeks. Your fault for picking the bloody crack o’ dawn ferry.”

Dochsley threw back his head and barked a laugh. “Ha! See, you don’t know Greg Lestrade as I do. You think he’s hankering for a long sleep and a lie in, and meanwhile I haven’t seen him so prim and polished in all my days. Look at ‘im. Looks like he just stepped out of ‘cop o’ the year’ magazine, that one. He ain’t afraid of no six o’clock ferry, now, are you Sir?”

He grinned at me in a way I hadn’t been grinned at since rugby mates in school looked over at me after a victorious win. 

Gillian tilted her head and ran her hand through her red hair. “I am lookin’,” she said, and something about the tone of her voice, the droop of her eyes . . .

_(he must have looked at you that way, didn’t he? on the deck? in the cabin? on the burlap? and that night, when he finally held you in the sea, and you held him, and he took you down, down, down to the bed of his bones, he looked at you that way, and he had tears in his eyes, and he kissed you like you hadn’t been kissed in two hundred years_

_then he brought you ashore_

_left)_

Someone whistled. Dochsley fake saluted from the doorway and smirked at Gillian. “Cor, sir, looks like you just got your wake-up call all sorted then.” Another whistle from the hall. “See you at six!”

The door slammed behind him.

Gillian was in front of me, leaning against the desk. She was tall and smelled like soap and still radiating from the excitement of the case. Her hair was draped across her shoulder.

(I missed him.)

“Got an hour for a drink before you catch up on that beauty rest?” she said. Her voice rang crisply through the room, curling and warm, hints of the accent which was carved across the insides of my ribs.

(I missed him.)

“Ah,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets. “Might just turn in. Dochsley was just taking the piss ‘bout me lookin’ all put together. I’m right knackered.”

She leaned forward, her green eyes tracing up my neck. “Don’ look quite that knackered to me,” she whispered. “Only a drink, innit? Your last night here . . . might be nice . . .”

(I _missed_ —)

“Gillian, I don’t . . .” I stopped and swallowed hard. Tried with every fiber of my being to remember his strong arms around my chest, holding me firmly back from the cliff, above the raging sea. Tried to remember the warmth of his breath, the sweet rum and corded rope of his voice, the caress of his hands.

( _”You came,” he’d said, and now he’s gone, gone, gone_ )

“Don’ what?” She took a step forward, lowering her voice. Her fingertip traced a roving pattern on the desk corner. “I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that . . . aren’t I?”

Hot water filled my exhausted stinging eyes. I couldn’t even sense the heat from her body. Couldn’t hear the roar of the sea. Couldn’t smell the tea on her breath. Couldn’t _feel_.

Somewhere, distantly, a door slammed shut. Someone called out a goodnight and goodbye.

“Gillian,” I said again, her name tasting stale in my mouth. “I don’t think you . . .”

_(you can’t remember the exact shade of his blue eyes, can you?)_

I stopped myself, then shrugged too casually, like I was admitting I didn’t have the money for a cab. My heartbeat roared through the empty station. “I’m not that way,” I finally said.

She frowned, then hummed. “You mean you’re not a free man?”

_(you can’t remember where he kissed you, how he held you, the soft strands of his hair_

_can’t remember because you left, because you forgot, and now he’s gone and lonely and cold and_ gone _)_

“No, not that. Not really,” I whispered, inwardly burning thinking of the one identified ‘her’ who’d been flashing across my phone for two weeks up until around two days ago. “Not anymore.”

Eight days. Nineteen hours. Twelve seconds. Thirteen.

(I missed him. I was horrible and disgusting and dead. And I missed him.)

“Then what?” she whispered, and she was so patient, but so horribly sad, curling her spine, trying to ask a dead man for a drink, a dead man who fucked another dead man’s ghost.

(John.)

“It’s just that . . . I don’t . . _feel_ things that way,” I heard myself say, and I glanced once, just once, at the hollow of her throat. The V of her blouse. Then quickly looked away.

The room pulsed and buzzed. Interminable seconds passed—ones where her eyes traced around my face with a small frown. The clock on the wall ticked and ticked and ticked.

She sucked in a breath. “ _Oh_.”

(I was waiting. And I didn’t have the strength to wait two hundred years. I wasn’t brave and patient and beautiful. I wasn’t like John.)

_(you were never like John)_

“Yeah,” I said down at the desk. “Oh.”

Her eyes grew huge and wet. “You never said . . .?”

“Not gonna come up during a murder case, innit?” I winced at the harsh tone of my voice, and quickly raised a soft hand. “Sorry, sorry.”

“Oh, Greg,” she whispered, and I wanted to die at the sadness in her voice, the pity and the care and the bloody _understanding_.

I wondered if maybe the paperwork and the desk phones and the pencils and the fluorescents would wrap around my skin and yank me back down to earth for good. If I could stand there and open my mouth and tell her that I once fancied myself in love with a ghost, right out there on her beloved Shetland shores. If I could shake my head in disbelief, and laugh it all off, and tell her about it, animated with my hands raised up in the air in the corner of the bar, and she would gape at me and ask for more and giggle when I said how funny it was when I almost drowned, when I almost jumped off a cliff, when I lay naked on the sunrise shore after the ghost put his icy lips on my face. 

And we would go home together, and she would peel off my clothes, and I wouldn’t be cold. She would smirk and say, “ _I’m glad you came around and saw some sense, Lestrade,_ ” and I would smirk back, lying naked in her arms, and laugh, “ _Well, you know, maybe I’m not_ that _much that way._ ”

She wouldn’t feel like ice in the air. She wouldn’t scream across the sea.

_(she wouldn’t be John Hamish Watson. because he was dead.)_

“I have to go,” I said. I leapt up from where I was leaning against the desk as if the wood had burned me. Strode towards the door without my wallet or my phone or my keys.

“Greg!” she called behind me. “Wait, Greg, it’s alright, you know! It’s all fine. I’m sorry I didn’t . . . It’s alright! I understa—!”

“You were a right angel to have on the case,” I said down to my feet in a monotone rush. “Couldn’t’ve done it without you. They should promote you. I have to go.”

“But it’s okay that you’re—!”

I shut the door carefully behind me so it wouldn’t slam. 

I held my head steady as I walked briskly through the halls, one foot in front of the other, perfectly spaced between the walls. I may have nodded at other officers I passed on my way, may have said goodnight or thanked them for the work or told them I’d come back and visit Shetland one day. I never heard high heels behind me; Gillian never tried to follow.

The air outside felt like nothing at all as I burst through the station front doors without breaking my stride. It was muffled and numb against my skin. Bleak and empty. I walked directly out of the parking lot and set off in a random direction down the desolate road, walking and walking with my head high and hands stuffed in my pockets, barely even taking in air, not looking left or right. 

I just walked, and I don’t even remember making the conscious decision to enter that derelict phone box on the dark corner. Don’t remember carefully opening the door or shutting it behind me. Don’t remember the musty smell or the cobwebs or wet leaves littering the rusting floor.

But then I broke.

A horrifying sound bubbled up out of my throat, and I was suddenly down on my knees, my forehead pressed against the grimy, smeared glass. I slammed my hands against the walls just to feel the sting, just to feel anything at all, to have a fucking sensation, and I couldn’t even hear the ringing slam against the glass.

“Fuck!” I screamed. “Fuck buggering fuck!”

I couldn’t hear it.

“FUCK!”

The walls of the phone booth directly absorbed the sound. The panes didn’t even rattle. I grabbed the back of my neck with my freezing hand just to pretend it was a puff of icy air, but I couldn’t feel it it at all—not even a wisp.

“I miss you,” I heard someone moaning, probably myself. I huddled over on the ground, curled up within the tiny walls. The shadows covered my body, pulling me down into the impenetrable black. We leaves stained the clean, pressed fabric of my expensive suit, mud smeared my skin, and the wind beyond the panes groaned and wailed through the cracks in the glass.

( _you don’t remember where the calluses are on his hands, how he panted and cursed when you kissed his thighs, how he tasted)_

“Fuck, I miss you,” I whispered, water covering my cheeks, and nobody answered back.

 

\--

 

It was midnight.

Or, at least, I thought it was midnight. I’d left everything back in the station—didn’t even check out of my room at the motel. I’d caught a night bus to one end of town and made sure to say something memorable to the driver, then flagged a cab and took it straight back in the other direction, then I walked. Left my shoes in the moss at the side of the road so I wouldn’t leave police-issued footprints. Bought a cheap coat at the 24-hour mart at the edge of town—the only mart I knew I’d never gone into before during my stay.

And as I snuck through the shadows of crofts and farmhouses, snaking along the road, edging closer to the sea, for the first time since John Watson’s wisp-of-air hands left my face nine days ago on the grey shore, I could smell the fresh spray of moss and ice in the air. Taste the crackling salt from the sea.

I could _feel_.

I crouched behind the pile of wood pallets and shipping containers down by the docks, my heart pounding in my chest, and my fingers and toes burning and numb. I keenly tracked the movements of the night shift workers—the incoming fishing schooners and the offloading boats. The gravel stung against my knees, and the wind blew rotten fish and moldy wood into my face, and I was freezing, and it was the most wonderful feeling in the entire world. The crumbling, midnight dockyard was more beautiful than any sunrise I’d ever seen, on Shetland or beyond.

I was going to see him.

I was going out to sea, and Dochsley would step onto that blasted ferry without me at six, and Gillian wouldn’t be able to find me, not in any reasonable amount of time, and there would be hardly any witnesses, and my boss in London would shake his head and then promote the next eager upstart to fill my spot within the hour, and my phone would be thrown away, and my case file closed, and I would

swim and swim and swim

until he let me cover his bones with my body. Until he understood that I would come, I would always come, I would come for him even if it turned my bones to ice, if I never saw a sunrise again, if I couldn’t breathe.

( _he waited for you, cold and tired and alone)_

I was coming.

It was nearly four in the morning, judging by the conversation I overheard being yelled across the docks, when I finally spotted my chance. The docks were momentarily clear, the workers gone for their breaks, and no new ships were coming in from the black horizon by the lighthouse glow. Nobody would see.

I leapt up to my feet, wincing at the pins and needles in my legs, then burst from the shadows and sprinted across the molding docks in my socked feet. 

The air pierced my lungs and blasted against my face. I was soaring, flying, exploding across the rocking wood towards the little row boat tied to the very end of the docks—stained black and nearly falling apart and silent. Blessedly silent. 

I looked back over my shoulder, my breath wheezing in my screeching lungs, then hurled myself into the little dingy, immediately falling on my side on the rough, damp floor. A barnacle tore my trouser leg and pierced my skin.

It felt glorious.

I laughed to myself up at the black sky as I gripped the oars in my shaking hands and began to row. My muscles screamed and heaved and exploded, ripping across my shoulders and back as I pulled myself through water like a thick slab of midnight glass. 

The soft swells cocooned the rotting bottom of the little boat, and the ripples wrapped around my oars like muffled cream, and the stars lit my way. And I rowed and rowed until I could no longer make out the golden haze from the lights back on the shore, until the island disappeared into the foggy grey, until my palms bled, and my shoulders screamed.

I rowed, delighting in the pain bursting through my lungs. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted it to feel worse than a bullet piercing my chest. I wanted it to rip through me, and stab me, and suck the air from my lungs. I wanted to hurt so badly it would make John’s pain immaterial. So sharp and debilitating that it would make the memory of his fall back into the icy water feel like silk sheets in a warm bed.

(our bed)

He was going to rise up from the waters, brilliant and solid and warm, and he was going to welcome me home, tell me I _came_. He was going to open his watery arms for me, and I would fall into his sturdy chest, brush my cheek against the golden hairs covering his skin. He would cry out, “ _Oh love, oh love, oh love_ ” and he would take me down with him to the bottom of the sea where we would be safe from the bullets and the police lights and the ships and the raging swells.

He would call me Griogair. And I would call him John.

The barest tinge of gold was just pouring over the horizon when I finally halted my rowing. My arms and back spasmed and shook with the work and the cold. Blood dripped from my fingers. Peels of skin ripped off my palms. Wild sweat poured down my forehead and into my eyes, freezing in the icy air, and the rocky outlines of distant Shetland had completely disappeared up into the sky. 

The station and the suspects and Gillian and the ferry and my phone. One-eyed fishermen and Bressay libraries and bean nighe. All gone.

The silence was thick and oppressive after the rustling pull of the oars through the water for so long. I held my heaving breaths for a few seconds in my burning lungs, ears desperately listening for the tiniest hint of a sigh, a breath, a moan, the tuning fork.

Silence.

I looked madly around me, scanning the flat ocean, lifeless and stretching in every direction as far as I could see.

“John?” I whispered. I sucked in a lungful of damp air. “John!”

My voice echoed across the waters, billowing through the vast black expanse.

_(do you remember what his face looked like the first time you called him that? the first time you came in his hand and moaned his name, whispered it straight into his ear with your eyes shut tight, do you remember how he looked at you?_

_no)_

“John?”

A small swell slapped against the side of my boat with a plume of froth. I listened. 

Nothing.

I rose to my unsteady legs, flinging my arms out for balance when the boat keeled and rocked from side to side, trying to slow down the wheezing in my lungs so I could properly hear. 

He was going to see me standing there calling his name. He was going to hear me, and come for me, and listen to me tell him that I loved him, that I would be cold everywhere else in the universe, in life or in death, except in his arms. He was going to wrap those arms around me, and sigh against my cheek, and whisper his warm voice into my ear as we lay cradled by the velvet sea. He would be loved. And he would see.

And he would breathe back the wrinkles into my face, make my skin softer and older and worn. He would kiss the missing silver and grey through my hair, and lick lines around my eyes, and remind me what it felt like to be a man loved by him, a man who found him with his shirt billowing in the Spanish breeze. A man who _loved_. 

(and who finally came)

I cupped my palms around my mouth and puffed up my chest. “JOHN!” My heart started to race, and blood fizzled in my veins. “JOHN WATSON!”

I listened to the creak of the wood, the drip of sweat down my brow, the hiss of the wind.

Nothing at all.

Panic started to flutter and pulse in my fingers. Without thinking I stripped off my coat down to my wrinkled button-up shirt. I shucked off my trousers and left on my socks. After one last manic look across the flat, ghostless sea, I stepped up onto the edge of the little boat and leapt off into the water in a smooth dive, straight and clean.

Ice slapped my skin, freezing my chest and locking my thighs. I kicked and struggled to find the cloudy surface, desperately yanking up against the churning pull of the thick deep. My limbs felt too thick and heavy for my body, my skin too slick, as if I would fall straight down to the bottom with the pull of gravity.

But I finally burst through the surface and shrieked down air. My bones felt like they’d been ripped from the sockets, and my muscles sliced from my skin. My body moved without me, kicking and pulsing and spasming through the icy water, and the icy salt stung my eyes and burned down my throat.

I swam a few strokes away from the boat and turned in place, trying to keep my lips out of the sea. 

“John!” I screamed again, only it was more of a chattering whimper, a desperate gurgle. 

“John?” I swallowed down a huge gulp of kelp and ice. “John . . .”

And that was when it hit me.

I had not come. And neither would he.

And _oh_ . . . I wished John had told me whether he’d ever felt ready to die. 

If he knew, standing on the edge of the deck, with his back to the sea, and his crimes being read aloud, that those were his last breaths of oxygen in this life. If he accepted the fact with a brave set of his shoulders, or if he fought wildly against it, thrashing away from the deadly edge with snarling teeth. Whether they shot him in mercy because he went too gracefully, or shot him in reckless fear because he’d gone mad.

I kicked my legs more calmly beneath the water, aimlessly trying to keep my head up out of the sea. The sky above me was starting to turn grey with the coming dawn, restless and churning and blowing away swaths of thick fog. It was lilac and glowing, tinged at the very edges of the horizon with faint gold the shade of his tanned skin.

It was beautiful.

And an odd calm descended upon my limbs, slowing their thrashing through the oblivious sea. I watched the ripples from my body glide out across the smooth surface, effortlessly surging away from me to visit distant lands, the rest of the world. 

I wondered if John had ever gotten to see the rest of the world. If he could have traveled the seas by swimming across the ocean floor after he died, transparent and watery and strong. If he gave up every sight on earth just to wait for me off the Shetland coast. Or I wondered if he would have had a better view of the earth from up in the clouds, floating among the stars where the blue of his eyes would absorb the vast blue of quiet dusk. 

I wondered what he saw when he was alive from the ships, all the ships he sailed without me for all those years before I ever set foot on his same boat. If the sea smelled differently in Spain than it did off the coast of Africa. If he ever got to taste a soft fig, or a ripe peach, or lie back in white, hot sand under a clear sun and look up at brilliant palm trees swaying with the breeze.

(my lips were below the water now, and that mattered a great deal, it mattered to _him_ , because it meant I was coming, and there might have been an odd, distant noise across the waters, something calling out and churning the calm sea

but I knew it wasn’t him)

I wondered as my limbs sank into the cradling ice why he ever thought me beautiful—  
what I had ever done to deserve the love of his soul. I wondered if he ever sang to me, sailor’s songs he must have learned in ports with old fiddles. I wondered if he smoked a cigar, or what ale he drank, or if he owned any books in his little Bressay house even though he’d never be able to read their pages. If he kept a garden.

(my nose was in the sea, and it mattered more than anything, because I was closer to him, and I thought that maybe I heard the booming echoes of another voice 

but it wasn’t his)

And I realized it would be an awfully painless thing to do, just to drift off and sink until the tips of my toes touched his bones. And even if he never came, even if he didn’t see, I could still keep them warm while he flew through the clouds over the world—while he saw everything he never got to see. I could sing to him, and tell him I never smoked a cigar in my life, and that I loved deep amber ales, and that my favorite book when I was young was _Peter Pan_. I could tell him every line I still remembered from the worn pages.

_(but was_ your _favorite book Peter Pan? (no, not even published yet, not even written, wrong wrong wrong) and did you never smoke a cigar? and did you drink deep amber ales and sing?_

_maybe his bones will tell you, maybe they’ll want to hear the story of the young boy who flew)_

I lifted my head once more above the water and closed my eyes as I weakly sucked in a breath. My legs stopped kicking.

“I love you,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. And I love you.” I took my last look up at the fading stars. “My John.”

_(he called you the pearl of his life, just once, and he told you of the garden he kept, the sea thrift and roseroot and spring squill that faintly bloomed each late spring in the weak sun, and then he asked you for the first of many times to come and share his bed in Bressay, to make his humble home your home, and that he would build a bigger bed for you to fit, sew a softer quilt_

_and you said you would come for him, for the first of many times_

_you remember all of that now, now that you’re finally coing)_

And then I sank, and I imagined the icy kelp was his warm hands on my calves, and that the burning in my chest was from his kisses across my mouth.

And I finally, finally remembered the exact shade of his eyes, as if they were right there staring into my face. And I was not cold.

 

\--

 

Something grabbed me.

Something grabbed me, and it was nothing like the warm whoosh of a sailor’s gentle hands, and instead it was yanking me, hauling me, wrestling me through the black void. 

Something was grabbing my collar and my hair and forcing my face up from the sea into the choking sky, slamming my back hard with a rough palm, and then it was bashing me against solid wood, sliding splinters through my skin, and throwing me hard onto my back in the dry air.

My spine slammed against the solid surface with a great crack, and I cried out, water pouring from my mouth as I choked and gurgled. Everything burned and prickled with fire, my skin and my chest and my nose and eyes. My raw throat.

And something was yelling into my face, pressing on my chest, “Come on, fucking breathe. Christ, God, just _breathe_!”

I coughed up a lungful of seawater and screeched my first full breath into my frozen lungs, and something rough and solid grabbed my face. “That’s it, breathe!”

Something sounded not entirely unlike John Watson.

I flung open my eyes and gasped a warbled curse from my throat. Hands were on my chest, my face, my neck, and there was a figure above me, grey in the dull light and blurry from the salt stinging my eyes. But I thought that maybe the slope of his shoulders, the waves of his hair, the curve of his ears . . .

“John,” I tried to say, but it came out as a horrific, gurgling moan. The figure above me was dripping wet, shivering in the air, and I blinked my eyes over and over to clear the water from my vision, waiting for that figure to bend down, and press his lips to my face, and curl me into his chest, and whisper, “ _Griogair . . . Oh, I’m here. You came . . ._ ”

But instead the figure gripped my soaked shirt with his shaking fists. “The fuck were you thinking, man?!” it screamed into my face. “Why did you jump into the fucking water?! You fucking drowned! God, what even _possessed_ you to—”

His voice sent blasting puffs of hot air across my face, warming my frozen cheeks and nose and flinging away the last sheen of water from over my eyes. I opened them again, trembling against the rough wood under my back, and as my gaze finally focused on the screaming figure above me, I gasped.

It _was_ John Watson.

And yet, it was decidedly _not_ John Watson.

He wasn’t hazy around the edges, or shimmering across his skin. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, and his hair was too short, and his lips weren’t chapped, and his soaked-through shirt looked cared for, almost new. His hands weren’t cold, and he wasn’t walking on the surface of the sea, and he wasn’t tan, judging by the faint light of the coming dawn, and he didn’t have any deep wrinkles around his eyes, and his hair wasn’t streaked with a hint of grey.

And he was _furious_.

The man shook me again, gripping my shirt. “What the fuck about this water made you think it was good for a swim, you fucking moron?! You could have died! If I hadn’t’ve been here . . . Fuck, man, don’t fucking do that again! Do you hear me? Good Christ, I can’t even believe you—”

I shot upwards, sitting upright and flinging myself back against the side of the ship—his ship, this man’s ship, with fishing nets and traps neatly stacked up along the sides, and a soaking wet lifebuoy lying beside me on the pristine floor. 

I stared at him. I would have thought it was physically impossible for me to breathe that fast.

“How did you . . .” I panted, the earth shattering around me. “How did you find . . . ?”

He frowned, as if his answer was surprising even himself. He tilted his head. “Coulda sworn I heard you calling out . . .” Then he hummed, shut his mouth and shook his head. “Nevermind. I saw you.”

I was trembling so hard my bones clattered against the ship’s sides. A helpless whimper slipped out of my throat. I wanted to hurl myself back overboard to the world that I knew, the belly of the ship and the soft hands and the swinging cot. The man who didn’t scream at me and who had wrinkles and who called me love.

The face of the man kneeling before me suddenly softened, some of the bright hot anger leaving the lines around his young mouth. “Hey now, alright, you’re alright,” he was saying. He crawled towards me and hesitantly reached out a hand to my shoulder. “Catch your breath, now, man. You’re gonna be alright. You’re safe. You’re—”

And that’s when I saw the most remarkable thing I had ever seen with my own two eyes, as if I was seeing now it for the very first time.

The distant waters beyond the man’s ship suddenly rose up towards the heavens, swirling into a pillar in the hazy dawn light, and a watery arm rose up from the churning chaos, reaching and stretching until the water formed a man standing on the surface of the sea.

Formed John Watson.

And he was beautiful in the weak sun. Strong and brave and looking at me with an expression which transformed his entire face, made it solid and warm and covered in real skin. Made his eyes incredibly blue.

_Oh, my love . . ._ he called out to me, vibrating the floor of the ship. I could see that his eyes were wet, and his full lips shook with emotion.

The man in front of me looked down shocked at his feet where the wood had just trembled, his brow scrunched and confused. “What the—?”

_Beautiful love,_ John said in his golden voice, swirling around me with a sudden warm breeze. He held out his strong arm, glinting in the fresh ribbons of sun, and he stretched out his palm. 

_You will always come,_ he whispered. _I’m never gone._

I licked my frozen lips to try to speak, shaking against the creaking ship. “I will always come,” I breathed, barely more than a moan on the air.

He nodded. He heard it. 

Then his brilliant face broke. _I’m sorry . . . you were so cold . . . I couldn’t . . ._

“I loved you,” I whispered. My hands gripped the dry wood of the ship. “I did . . .”

The man before me blinked and stared hard into my face, and I saw goosebumps shiver across his arms. “What—what did you say?”

_My Gregory . . . Gregory, my brave one . . ._

And John took a step back from the ship, fading back into the glowing sun as it poured across the calm waters, the hum of the tuning form pitched through my veins like a sweet flood. The heat of his kiss suddenly pressed in the center of my chest, heavy and warm and solid and—

“What the fuck? How did you—?”

The man before me was staring down at my chest, mouth dropped open in shock. I looked down and saw that there really was something heavy and warm and solid lying in the center of my chest, straight over my sternum through my soaked shirt.

I wrapped my shaking, bloodstained fingers around the compass, miraculously warm, and held it out in my palm between me and the man.

“How . . .” I whispered, just as the man reached up a trembling finger to trace the edge of the gold and breathed, in a tight voice, “How did you find this?”

I frowned and looked up at him, my throat suddenly hot and tight at the familiar blue of his eyes, the gold of his lashes.

“You’ve seen this?” I heard myself ask in a rough voice.

His eyes were wet and blown wide open. He bit his lip and nodded. “Found it when I was a boy on the shore. I’ve always kept . . . I lost it two weeks ago overboard. I didn’t know . . . didn’t think . . . how did you . . .?”

_Gregory,_ John whispered to me, and I briefly closed my eyes to savor my name, my true name, for the last time in his voice—because I knew it was the last time. Knew it by the set of his shoulders, and the rise of his beautiful chin. But I also knew that he wouldn’t be gone, and I wasn’t scared. 

And I was warm.

When I opened my eyes, he was fading away into the brilliant, smeared colors of the dawn sky, his skin turning to marbled, gold water and ribbons of foam.

He held his strong hand over his chest and looked at me. _Thank you . . ._ And just as he faded away into a spray of salt mist. _Remember us._

A warm breeze blew across myself and the man, rattling the walls of the ship and blowing the wet hair back from my face. The man kneeling in front of me tore his gaze away from the compass flung his head over his shoulder at where I’d been captivated and staring. 

He breathed hard through his nose and held utterly still. “What was that?” he breathed.

I stared at the place where John had just said goodbye. Where he’d finally flown up into the clouds. “Was the breeze,” I whispered.

The man blinked hard and shook his head. “But I thought I heard . . .” He rubbed his eyes and whispered a curse. “I thought I just saw . . .”

“You can have this,” I said. I held out the compass to him in my palm, the gold of it dripping with saltwater and blood. 

The man turned back and stared at it in my hand, and it seemed as if our lungs were falling into their own steady rhythm, as if even the floor of the ship was pulsing with our veins. The air sat thickly between us as we breathed, and I realized, as I looked at the calluses on his hands from reeling in fishing line, and the sun-kissed strands of his wet hair, and the freckle on his jaw, that I knew where every one of those calluses were on his fingers. I knew how they tasted.

But then again, maybe I didn’t.

And maybe there would be a freckle on the back of his thigh. And maybe not. And I didn’t know all the shades of his hair without the silver and grey. And the light was still too dim to see the full color of his deep eyes.

I desperately wanted to know.

I wanted to ask this man if he had ever traveled the world in his ship. On a plane. And if he ever smoked a cigar, or if he thought that they killed your lungs. And if he kept a garden. If he lived in a yard-less flat. What was his favorite book. And whether he’d ever breathed in the Spanish breeze. If he liked peaches more than figs. 

The man shook his head where he stared down at the compass in my palm, then he lifted a steady hand to slowly, hesitantly wrap my fingers back around the smooth metal. He barely touched my skin.

“You can keep it,” he whispered. He kept his fingers over mine. “Remind you not to do something so bloody stupid ever again.”

“Okay,” I said, just as the first strong rays of the glowing sun peeked up over the water, spilling full light across the boat in a golden rush, illuminating his skin.

His face was incredibly close. He licked his lips. “What’s your name?” he asked. He frowned as he looked straight into my eyes. “I feel . . . I feel like I’ve maybe met you somewhere before . . .”

Something hot curled in my chest. I blinked back water from my eyes. “Gregory,” I said in a rough voice, as if I’d never said it before. “Well, Greg.”

He nodded. He apparently wasn’t put off at all by a man nearly crying when he spoke his own name.

“Gregory,” he said back, and _oh_ , I did get to hear it again in his voice, the beautiful sound of his smooth lips over the word, hunkering down in the hidden places between my bones. Freshly inscribed on the inside of my ribs. Brighter and younger with a softer brogue than the beautiful words already carved there. My chest swelled with the incredible power of containing them both.

I wondered if the belly of his ship groaned with the sea. If it smelled of spiced rum. How much softer than burlap were his sheets.

And before the dripping wet man kneeling before me could open his mouth to introduce himself back, I covered his hand around the compass with my own, and leaned forward until I could taste the sweet puffs of his breath. I listened to the hushing waves, felt the sturdy, solid wood of the ship beneath my bones. Breathed in the crisp air of the Shetland coast.

And I called him John.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sincere thanks to ye small but mighty group who have encouraged me and sent kudos while this has been posting! I had a lot of fun with this fic doing something a little different from my usual fare, and of course indulging my Johnstrade. Thanks for trusting me with the tags and ending.
> 
> Drop me a line if you enjoyed it, it makes all the hard work worthwhile!
> 
> And if you missed Sherlock Holmes in this fic, and if Johnlockstrade sounds like your thing, I just started posting my new Winter Olympics AU "Of Ice and Men" on AO3. Check it out if you want a new WIP to dive into, with no ghosts and more sex! :)


End file.
